Announcing the winner of our Summer Poetry Contest!
Join us in congratulating Sadie McCarney, whose poem, “At Broke Kid Summer Camp, We Taught Ourselves About Spirals,” was chosen as the $500 grand-prize winner from close to 200 individual poems submitted to our first-ever poetry contest.
Here’s what contest judge Misha Solomon had to say about Sadie’s poem:
“At Broke Kid Summer Camp, We Taught Ourselves About Spirals” is a dazzling display of balance, a poem whose craft never gets in the way of its affect and whose affect never gets in the way of its craft. Through fifteen rhythmically sound couplets, the speaker recounts a narrative that hops through time and space, a tennis ball betraying the laws of physics and bouncing in endlessly surprising ways. Like the “scarlet caul” resembling a “chic beret of blood” upon the speaker’s interlocutor’s newborn head, this poem has “star quality.” The poem never explains why the speaker and the “grape one-buck body glitter” covered more-than-friend taught themselves about spirals, but I came away from the poem feeling as if I had learned something about spirals as well, the way they revolve around a fixed centre, each loop introducing pleasing new complexities to their mathematical perfection.
At Broke Kid Summer Camp, We Taught Ourselves About Spirals
& your fresh-freckled face. Began
with thick pink chalk at tennis
court’s edge & kept going: green,
then blurple in fissures & crags,
faultlines that failed to hide mine
shafts the ramshackle Rec Centre
was built on. Giggles. We were
strong late dandelions fertilized
by neglect. You & your gleam
of grape one-buck body glitter
rubbed off on my raw sunburn
of crack & peel skin. Yellow was
next. Something was always next;
born in a bathtub, you shocked
your teen Mom coming out – your
scarlet caul a chic beret of blood
she saved. Star quality. As one
we prayed a rosary with chalk-
dusted hands, our delicate beads
of sweat. Thirst so big I’d swig
a gutter puddle or a left-behind
Pepsi. Then, our last rain: a rain
that sizzle-smoked where it fell,
cheap oil in the cast-iron skillet
of our street. Cleansed the clumsy
rainbows gone. You stopped, drip-
dripped back inside. But I kept
sketching those spirals around me
like chalk outlines, fresh crime
scenes. I’m drawing spirals still.
Sadie McCarney (she/they) is the author of three books, most recently the verse novel The Bright Afters (ECW Press, 2026). She won first place in the 2023 Grain Short Grain Poetry Contest and in the 2025 Room Creative Non-Fiction Contest. Their writing has also appeared in places including CV2, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Geist, The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, and Best Canadian Poetry. Sadie lives on the unceded Mi’kmaq ancestral lands of Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island), with three humans and two cats.
