To ride an art horse by Manahil Bandukwala

Manahil Bandukwala has made the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist forTo ride an art horse.

The winner of the 2019CBCPoetry Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency attheBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 14, 2019. The winner will be announced on Nov. 21, 2019.

• 33 writers make the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist

AboutManahil

Manahil Bandukwala is a Pakistani writer and visual artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, Paper Doll and Pipe Rose. In 2019, she won Room's emerging writer award and the Lilian I. Found Poetry Award. Recent work has appeared in Prism International, Bywordsand Looseleaf. She is currently working on a literary-visual project, Reth aur Reghistan, with Nimra Bandukwala, which can be found on sculpturalstorytelling.com. She is on the editorial board of Canthius, a feminist literary and arts magazine.

Entry in five-ish words

A pocket of teenage defiance.

The poem's source of inspiration

"I was reading an article about how women in Pakistan often have to sit perched on motorcycles because it would be 'improper'to sit straddling the bike like men do. Around the same time, [Ontario premier] Doug Ford started implementing his cuts to public education. I started thinking about the two in relation to each other and wondered about the common threads between the two. I remembered being in school in Karachi, in Pakistan, and how art class in O Levels was one of the few spaces where teachers didn't lecture us about the 'properness'of our uniforms. Instead, we could focus on what we were there for. Having teachers who promoted that sort of environment was so necessary for those small seeds of resistance. I connected the two streams of current political dialogue with a memory, and out came the poem."

First lines

At sixteen we straddled benches
six inches wide
& long, one end an adjustable incline,

placed wooden boards, sheets of fresh paper
taped down. Twelve of us
in a third floor room

four days a week. Here we ditched our dupattas
kept them white & crisp & ready
to cover chests when the hour was up.