Previous winners of the Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest
Kate Kennedy
Ledges
2023
Kate Kennedy is a poet, editor, and reviewer. Her poetry has been published in The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, and Maisonneuve, among other journals, and has twice been selected for The Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Originally from Lillooet, BC, Kate spent many years in the Maritimes before returning to her home province. She now lives and works in Victoria.
Each of the dozen poems in Ledges places us “on the edge of leaving,” then drags us right back to the downtown streetlights we all might otherwise have left behind. So what at first seem to be practical tools reveal, with scrutiny, another species of utility: a bench turned wobbly coffee table, an unused hand-smithed hook, a living-room plane without its workshop, Egyptian goddesses and wayward lexicons cozied up against a good old dog and a squatting Kamloops ranch-hand. While it might be true that “Sometimes it is the long black edge / of nothing” that matters most in these poems, it’s also a moonrise over an aunt’s shoulder that overtakes the story. Here are poems where the underpass declares who lives here, not the welcome signs. The windows (seen through windows) these worlds open offer, in the end, not just thoughtful beauty, but also ways forward, through and with the trees, where all of us end up “braced against the mountain’s incline / before continuing down / into the valley, home.”
Photo: Sarah Kilian