12 Days of CanLit: 1 Latner Prize for Poetry Winner

After 12 fabulous days of highlighting 77 titles around various themes, we knew the last title, Day 12, had to be something pretty special. We think we’ve found you a gem.Day 12 is the latest collection of poetry by the inaugural winner of the Latner Prize for Poetry, Ken Babstock’s On Malice.The Latner Prize for Poetry is given out by the Writers’ Trust of Canada to recognize a mid-career poet whose previous collections are stellar, and their future bright to contribute further to the Canadian poetry community. Ken Babstock fit that bill very well as his previous work has all been well received, winning him the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, an Atlantic Poetry Prize, and the list goes on.On Malice, published this fall by Coach House Books, is made up of four long poems, with an overarching theme of surveillance, confusion, and paranoia. There are also some historical points of view, touching on the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the works of Walter Benjamin, William Hazlitt, and John Donne, as we spend time at an abandoned NSA surveillance station in Berlin. As we move through the poems we see a continuous thread, that of our own complicity in the technologies that watch us. 

*****That’s it, friends! We’ve reached the end of our 12 Days of CanLit. We hope you enjoyed our little holiday ditty (if you sing the names of the themes in your head, they actually fit the tune of 12 Days of Christmas!). Don’t forget you can always re-read them here to relive the excitement.We’ll be back on Monday with some more great picks for the poetry lover on your list from poet and editor Paul Vermeersch, on Day 1 of our Holiday Gift Guide Week!