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League of Canadian Poets 2024 Poetry Award Longlists
We rounded up the incredible poetry collections making up 2024’s Gerald Lampert, Pat Lowther, and Raymond Souster Award longlists, awarded by the League of Canadian Poets.
All Books in this Collection
Showing all 15 results
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archipelago
$20.00Shortlisted for the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
The islands of an archipelago are isolated above sea level but attached underwater; connected yet separate. archipelago, the debut poetry collection from Laila Malik, traces fragments of family, becoming and unbecoming against the shifting shorelines of loss, multigenerational migration, and (un)belonging.
Malik’s lyrical poems intertwine histories of exile and ecological devastation. Beginning with a coming of age in the 80s and 90s between Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa and Kashmir, they subvert conventions of lineage, instead drawing on the truths of inter-ethnic histories amidst sparse landscapes of deserts, oceans, and mountains. They question why the only certainties of “home” are urgency and impossibility.
At its core, archipelago is a letter to the daughters who come before and after, a quiet disclosure of barbed ancestral legacies that only come into focus through poetry.
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Baby Book
$22.952023 Governor General’s Award for Poetry Finalist* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award
“God is personal,” the astrologer said. Terrifying and also personal, like a baby.
Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a family vacation on a discount bus tour to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Amy Ching-Yan Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death — how everything is constantly, painfully remade — offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.
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Bottom Rail on Top
$22.95Shortlisted 2024 Raymound Souster Award
A rolling call and response between antebellum Black history and the present that mediates it.
Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of his own life. Amidst echoes and complicities, roots and flights, lineage and mastery, it’s a story of stories told in knots and asides, held together with paper trails, curiosities, and hooks — a study that doesn’t end.
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Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin
$20.00Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin is a swirl of energy, emotion and observation that takes the reader across the world on a Carmen Sandiego–like journey as well as deep into the complexities of modern queer life. Unabashedly sexual, and embracing a wide range of styles and tones, Byrne’s poems move easily from lines of love and desire to sharp critiques of capitalism and war, and the co-opting of queer culture by them both. These are destabilizing poems, poems filled with glittering imagery and ideas and questions and truths, poems that share the poet’s longing to live in a time that is not “as cruel and unjust / As every other time has been before it.”
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Chores
$19.95***2024 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Winner***
This semi-autobiographical collection of poetry offers an historical snapshot of domestic life that views women’s labour, relationships, and sexuality through a feminist lens.
Chores is about families and the domestic work of settler women on the island of Newfoundland. A comedy and a tragedy in equal parts, Chores explores everyday life with all its pleasures and suffering.
The simple, indirect, and accessible language of Chores creates vivid, recurring images of food, household objects, body parts, and animals. The poems scrutinize the physical and social details of domestic labour and of the conditions in which women did, and continue to do, the work of sustaining life.
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Crushed Wild Mint
$19.95Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet’s motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing—held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.
Housty’s poems are textural—blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow—and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader’s whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors’ bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty’s exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community…
Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.
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Drank, Recruited
$20.00I drank once for the want of it, twice to be rid of it.
I drank the first time because I was afraid to drink the second time.
I drank the first time to prepare myself to drink the second time.
I drank the first time so I had to drink less the second time.
I drank the first time without knowing so the second was my first time.
I drank once to be recruited, twice to recruit others.Drank, Recruited is about knowing through thirsting; drinking through wanting. Love as a silken rug which stretches from thought to fact so that there be aliveness where there is certainty, and life where there is fact. With a voice of eruptive sincerity and intimate incisiveness these poems are scenarios of language-making and relation.
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Elementary Particles
$22.95Longlisted 2024 Raymond Souster Award
Part family history, part scientific exploration, Elementary Particles examines the world through the lens of a daughter grieving the loss of her beloved father.
Through keen, quiet observation, Sneha Madhavan-Reese’s evocative new collection takes us from the wide expanse of rural India to the minute map of Michigan we carry on the palms of our hands. These poems contemplate ancestral language, the wonder and uncertainty of scientific discovery, the resilience of a dung beetle, the fleeting existence of frost flowers on the Arctic Ocean.
The collection is full of familiar characters, from Rosa Parks to Seamus Heaney to Corporal Nathan Cirillo, anchoring it in specific moments in time and place, but has the universality that comes from exploring the complex relationship between a child and her immigrant parents, and in turn, a mother and her children. Elementary Particles examines the building blocks of a life — the personal, family, and planetary histories, transformations, and losses we all experience.
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More Sure
$19.95American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book; Trillium Book Award for Poetry winner; Gerald Lampert Memorial Award finalist (League of Canadian Poets)
A book of poems and interruptions, recording instances of love, self-realization, and recovery in non-binary, queer, and autistic lives.
In their stunning debut collection, A. Light Zachary draws power from a vision of life – especially queer and neurodivergent life – as a journey of continuous self-realization. These poems record the experience of locating oneself over and over again, within gender, language, family, labour, sexuality, fear, and love.
Reaching back to claim queer space in the oldest Western canon, Zachary interrupts famous quotations from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, asking: what advice might Juvenal or Seneca have handed down to non-binary citizens? Elsewhere, in concise and fluid verses that draw from punk rock and quantum physics, they ground the work firmly in the present. Come: invade with the alien. Evade with the coyote. These poems propose a certain supremacy: in these unending journeys of discovery and alienation, “we become more sure of who we are than you.”
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Selvage
$22.95We don’t choose the stories we inherit, but we can stitch new futures from the threads of our past.
Selvage is a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements. Fragments from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees talking to one another through mycelial networks, familial stories, and ruminations on the cusp of motherhood are literally and lyrically torn apart, spun, and sewn together to create a collage of what it means to be human, which is to say, what it means to be incomplete and fragmented. Mashing up the traditional lyric with innovative form and visual poetry, this experimental work is deeply personal, but it also attempts to gesture towards the human experience by showing the unfinished seams of our existence: the messy ends, beautiful twists, and unexpected new beginnings sewn together with intertwined threads of intergenerational trauma and love.
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Slows: Twice
$23.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 A.M. KLEIN PRIZE FOR POETRY
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023
Backward and forward: a double book of mirrored poems about identity in all its forms.
This is a book of slow hours, days, and years – how they can collapse into one another, how it can feel like we are living one day repeating itself. From within this collapse, the speaker seeks connection everywhere. They visit their father’s birthplace, Jogjakarta; they listen to a stranger’s phone call at the Motel 6 in Alberta; they linger in the so-called ethnic aisle of the grocery store. From all of these places the speaker is discouraged but tries to imagine a future joyously incomprehensible to the present.
Slows: Twice is a collection of revisions and repetitions; every poem in one half of the book has an alternate version, or a mirror poem, in the other half. The poems are tied to themes of work and labour, consumption and waste, family and home, as shapers of identity and relationships. The act of revising and repeating – slowly – is meant to be a resistance to efficiency, a resistance to being an always-productive body under capitalism.
“The poems of Slows: Twice collect in resonance, contemplate the construction of selves, with modes of repetition, sequencing, and mirroring, the way language assembles an identity or points to itself as it points away. ‘The clouds // disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it.’ Storied and cubistic, palindromic and cleaved, Liem’s poems reveal relationships to time, noise, and duration, and the possibility of joy given painful pasts.” – Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
“T. Liem is one of my favorite poets working in Canada. I welcomed this book into my life like sudden sunlight. Slows: Twice is a book about how urgently we need to read differently. I loved its mischievous relation to form and expectation as well as its burning intelligence. I once described T. as an inheritor of the tradition of language poetry, but what Slows: Twice proves is that T. is less an inheritor and more so an innovator, an inventor in their own right. I read it in one frenzied sitting.” – Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus
“It’s breathtaking to watch words drip from a page into a silver river cutting through a canyon of time. T. Liem sculpts poetry with steady, curious fingers, pushing against the filaments we think hold us together that have been quietly collecting cracks, from buried violence and whispered histories to the fragile connections tying us together. Obits. captured my heart; Slows: Twice now affirms it.” – Teta, founder of diasporic Indonesian publication Buah zine
“‘For everything I was, I am now something else.’ Revision of self and world are core to this innovative, unruly book that manages somehow to be at once formally wacky and emotionally clear. These poems seem to ask: if language is a box heavy with histories and inadequacies and which we nevertheless must carry, can language also carry us somewhere, elsewhere, strangely? Rarely have I encountered a book so at home in the unresolved, in the tension between a longing for declaration and a commitment to questions. T. Liem’s work conjures the figure of Janus: god of duality and gates, one face facing an end, the other looking through a new door, right in the eye of a dream.” – Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“T. Liem’s Slows: Twice is a fascinating exercise in revision and remaking, each repetition of its text accomplishing the arduous task of stretching time and geopolitical fixity. ‘asking and repeating/ we are made’ declares Liem, and that utterance produces the book’s essential maxim, ‘language is change/ changed by prosody.’ In between these cracks of time, language becomes a miracle suture for love and connection where the hard reality of one’s circumstances may produce infinite ruptures. This is a book that peers into the fissure, holding these moments of fracture as still and clearly as possible–a future of proximates.” – Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, the Swarm
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Sonnets from a Cell
$22.95*Winner 2024 Raymond Souster Award* Longlisted 2024 Gerald Lampert Award* Winner 2023 Alcuin Award* Poems for and about the incarcerated.
Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters’ debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters’ own days “caught between the past and nothing” and to the structures that sentence so many “to lose.” Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.
Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.
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The Animal in the Room
$23.95LONGLISTED FOR THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD
Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history.
Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body — really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary – about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural world’s creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.
“Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan Kemp-Gee! Her poetry is curious, restless, uneasy, and imaginative; it is also highly disciplined, unfolds in precisely measured lines. Watch for brilliant uses of repetition — the slipperiness of meaning, its ever-doubling character, is on full display, played out in deft linguistic twists. A deadpan delivery amplifies the oddity of what’s encountered: arsenic-drunk wildcats, chlorinated orchids, the ‘one painful spot of blue’ in a deer’s eye. I can’t say strongly enough how grateful I am to have read this collection; don’t miss it.” – Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems
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Uncomfortability
$20.00Uncomfortability, Roxanna Bennett’s third book with Gordon Hill Press, pandemic conditions are explored in their individuated awfulness but also their paradoxical solidarity, the unifying collective status of being somehow constrained, life radically changing due to social proscription. Continuing her development and renovation of the sonnet form established in her previous books, but building on the form by arranging the text into seasonal divisions like a Book of Hours, Uncomfortability is devoted to this question from “Life Without Weather”, “Could we begin to love each other?s pain?” The book answers, “No one needs to fight. We are all the same.”
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Vixen
$20.00Winner of the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Sandra Ridley’s latest book offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: the medieval hunt, ecological collapse, and intimate partner violence.
Sparked by a haunting chance encounter with a fox, and told in six chapters of varying form, Vixen is as visceral as it is mysterious, sensuous as it is terrifying.
“Thicket” introduces us to stalking being akin to hunting; the similar threat of terror and—too often—a violent end. “Twitchcraft” locates the hunt in the home, the wild in the domestic, while “Season of the Haunt” explores the unrelenting nature of hunting. “Stricken” asks common questions that often implicitly justify such violence: Is the harassment ‘bad enough’ to allow us to label it criminal? Has all control been taken? Is the fear reasonable?
Vixen propels us to examine the nature of empathy, what it means to be a compassionate witness, and what happens when brutality is so ever-present that we become numb. This is a beautiful, difficult, wild tapestry of defiance and survival.