A “tough contest” is how English faculty member Lisa Baker describes the Bennington College Young Writers Award. But Letitia Chan’s ’17 collection of poems stood out among more than 2,000 entries, and she was awarded the first-place poetry prize.
Her poems cover topics such as a distant relationship between a mother and daughter to a grandfather who favors men over women, but only has granddaughters. “Most of my writing is only partly autobiographical. Often it is a version of something or an experience I took inspiration from,” says Letitia. She gives credit to Ms. Baker’s Advanced Creative Writing class and the workshop style of the classes where students receive “amazing feedback” on their work.
Letitia’s work was also recognized in another national contest, the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, where she earned a runner-up award.
Dilutions
It is six in the morning and my grandfather
is feeding sparrows on the balcony, grains of rice,
bird shit like egg white. He shies from the sky—
to look up would be to imagine his son, streak-ebbed
to speck of white, a figure careening. All
he has left is a handful of granddaughters. This,
watching the birds, is the closest he will come
to saying it. Grandmother and I watch the white
fleck the shrubs. For him it seems the sky has waned—
in a house of women, my grandfather cannot look
at us. But grandmother says a son lost is the world
cupped in both hands, the sky in your palms
to trickle away—it wells again. Now she holds me
to her sweat and I, girl in her grandmother’s arms,
am not cursed anymore. Grandfather retreats
through the door, as if he has realized that birds
do not pelt as bullets from above. Tomorrow
he will stumble out again, hoping for a rainstorm
of sparrows. The sky is brimming with the sweat
of women. The world comes and goes and I must learn
to hold the swell of it in my arms. Grandmother
and I take the gloves, the alcohol, and wipe the balcony,
the shit, the rice. I look at her and she is thinking
of all the sons she has never had. This morning
is bird shit, white, canvas awash with sweat, the smell,
nothing she has ever seen, and grandfather turns away,
unable to bear women, their sweat, their silence.
Letitia Chan, Class of 2017