Challenge winner: Jamie Uy

Challenge 1

The winner of the first challenge is Jamie Uy, a very promising young poet. The challenge was to take on the theme of consumerism responding to a photograph of a glacier with the phrase The Great White Sale projected on to it. Challenge setter, judge and poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, was “really struck by the vitality and freshness of this poem. It runs with the conceit of The Great White Sale and sustains it all the way through. The language is precise and Jamie Uy utilises the vocabulary of the shopping mall and advertising promotion to great effect. It also manages to strike a fruitful balance between passion and irony with its ‘death metal/hard rock/mix tapes by Pollution Apocalypse’ and ‘freeze-dried “not my fault” excuses’. The title is also very efficient and works both on a literal level and in a metaphorical sense.”

No Return Policy

Welcome to Paradise Limited & Co
Est. dawn of time/discovery of Arctic
Our Great White Sale best bargains:
$3 for a pair of black-as-coal mining hearts
(perfect for energy company galas)
$5 for penguin & choking plastic bottles statue
on bloated seal skin by
neighborhood-water-bottle-dump
$7 for dicey packs of Gamble the Future cards
(aces exempt)
$9 for 5 gallons whitewash of conscience,
dirty hands, and oil spills
$11 for Channel no. 2050
(greasy cellophane/grocery bag scent)
$13 for fossil fuel magnets to tack on
refrigerators back home
$15 for three death metal/hard rock
mixtapes by Pollution Apocalypse
$17 for freeze-dried ‘not my fault’
excuses, water-resistant.
Thank you for shopping at Paradise.

Biography

Jamie’s work has appeared in Huffington Post, Launch Pad, KidsWWwrite, A Point in Time, King of the Trees, GREYstone, and Wild Orphan. She was a Commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2012, and her poetry anthology, The 1 AM Astronaut and Other Poems, was published in the same year. She is the managing editor of Parallel Ink and is a secret chocoholic and not-so-secret flute enthusiast.