Eat the Bitterness by Emily Yiling Ma

Emily Yiling Ma has made the2024 CBC Poetry Prize shortlistfor (Eat the Bitterness).

She will receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand her poemhas been published onCBC Books.

The winner of the 2024CBC Poetry Prizewill be announced Nov. 21. They will receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency atBanff Centre for Arts and Creativityand have their work published onCBC Books.

This year's jury is composed ofShani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin.The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from thelonglist,which is chosen by a reading committee ofwriters and editors from across the country. Submissionsare judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style.

• Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin to judge 2024 CBC Poetry Prize

For more on how thejudging for the CBC Literary Prizes works,visit the FAQ page.

If you're interested in theCBC Literary Prizes, the 2025CBC Nonfiction Prizeopens in January and the 2025CBC Poetry Prizewill open in April.

About Emily Yiling Ma

Emily Yiling Ma (she/her) is a queer, Chinese-Canadian undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University pursuing a BA in English. She is a Hui Chinese settler on the unceded and occupied lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xwmkwym (Musqueam), Skwxw7mesh (Squamish), and sllwta/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her writing and artistic practices focus on diaspora, migration, language and language loss, manifestations of queernessand family lineages.

Ma toldCBC Booksabout the inspiration behind (Eat the Bitterness): "My relationship with my grandmother has always been punctuated by varying degrees of tension and warmth, tenderness and distance, accompanied by my slow loss of language and ability to communicate with her. My intent was to explore my grandmother's life in Canada and explore the superstitions and beliefs she's held over the years.

The initial drafts of this poem were more focused purely on superstitionand later drafts led me back to thinking about my family lineage and the ways in which these superstitions have been passed down. I wanted to look at the ways my grandmother's fears, beliefsand constructions of femininity have been passed down generationally, with her belief that women should hold onto their burdens and accept suffering on behalf of the family a term mirrored through the idea of .

I wanted to look at the ways my grandmother's fears, beliefs, and constructions of femininity have been passed down generationally.- Emily Yiling Ma

"My poem wants to know my grandmother better, and to be able to hold her with more closeness as she reaches the end of her life despite our cultural and emotional distances.

Our relationship grew more distant as we no longer knew how to fall into the roles we once occupied: her as caretaker, and me as child, with our roles now somewhat reversed in her old age. Her sole identity had been crafted around her maternal abilitiesand this too has been stripped away from her."

You can read (Eat the Bitterness) below.

(Eat the Bitterness)

Prompted by Hari Alluri / after Jennifer Patterson

My internal dialogue
had once sounded like the clipped and cut-
off tones of my grandmother's Cantonese, muttered and muted,
insistent and glowing as she brushed my hair with a flat wooden comb,
teeth cutting
into my scalp, my spine prodded straight with the back of her knee,
kneeling on her wooden bedroom floor
as she tugged my bristled hair straight. Still
her voice, so warm, so close to my open ears
filtered through the hairs inside my eardrums vibrating with sound,
flooding my mouth as I flinched
my head away, getting a sharp sting in response from both
the gritted teeth of her admonishment and
the prying teeth of the comb.

My grandmother keeps faded photographs of herself
from her first months in Canada
in a box in the back of her closet,
buried underneath the decades
of my yellowed birthday cards
and artwork, crayon and pipe cleaner,
my old clothes folded in small towers, red-stitched flowers
and hand-patched knees from her careful fingers.
One photo, curled at the edges, sits underneath,
her face, so young, so open,
looks away from the camera,
her gaze pointing off to the distance, a small smile decorating
a promise of hope, chin high, hair dark.
I tell her she should have been a model.
She closes her eyes and laughs in a way that asks if I've gone crazy,
open-mouthed,
her eyes flickering open to watch my grandfather's impassive face,
fading back into herself
when the moment passes
through her.

My grandmother murmurs to me in
cut-off tones to avoid watermelon and cold drinks
on my period
the summer after I get mine,
the noise of her slippers retracing her worn footsteps down the hallway carpet,
turning away from me, her voice growing distant
as she mutters about uterine pain and gestation.

My grandmother has accepted suffering into her frail body
until it has eaten her away, hands translucent and shaking,
blue-veined and paper-thin,
searching, stagnant.

My grandmother boils me bitter soups steeped in the stench of
overripe papaya and chicken bones,
bitter melon from the garden, lotus roots and sliced-up ginger,
combinations she swears will combat the restless spirits
carving space in my womb as she paces in the kitchen,
worn into the ground, and
I wonder if my grandmother fears something
pulsing with history
inside my uterine lining, a bitterness
passed on but never buried.

My grandmother calls me into her bedroom one day
after my grandfather has left the house.
Tucked behind neatly folded rows of
white bras and cotton underpants
is five hundred dollars in bills and coins,
the money pressed heavy and thick in my palms
as I try to refuse it.
Still, she presses it insistently into my hands
and tells me it's for you to keep,
her own hands trembling,
bills wrinkled with fifty years of marriage,
useless to her now that she's become too weak
to leave the house on her own,
the money she had concealed from my grandfather
tucked in her dresser drawer beside the broken teeth
of a wooden comb.

Read the other finalists

• There is no neutral way to say I was fourteenby Cicely Grace (Vancouver)
• Palimpsest Countyby Rachel Robb(Toronto)
• Northern Childhoodby EleonoreSchnmaier(Ketch Harbour, N.S.)
• The Killer and the Harpistby Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)

About the 2024CBC Poetry Prize

The winner of the 2024CBC Poetry Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand win a two-week writing residency atBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

If you're interested in theCBC Literary Prizes, the 2025CBC Nonfiction Prizeopens in January and the 2025CBC Poetry Prizeopens in April.The 2026CBC Short Story Prizewill open in September.