Lamprey
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LAMPREY
by Erika Kielsgard
* Winner of the 2023 International 3-Day Poetry Chapbook Contest
I am proud to select Erika Kielsgard’s Lamprey as the winner of the 3-Day Chapbook Prize. Kielsgard synthesizes branches of history, including oral history, and ecology to unpack the narrative of colonialism and its devastating impact on indigenous culture and the ecosystem of the Great Lakes region. Despite the compression of the chapbook form, Kielsgard has thrilled and educated me. I will never forget the shocking image of Lamprey Pie served at Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, nor Lake Superior seen through the lamprey’s nine mysterious eyes. The lamprey, as numinous metaphor and embodied reality, functions as a sieve through which Kielsgard has managed, in this sequence of brilliantly crafted, formally innovative poems, to decant the whole world.
-Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets