Liz Howard, Tolu Oloruntoba & D.M. Bradford shortlisted for 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize

The Griffin Poetry Prize has revealed its 2022 shortlists. 

The annual prize awards $65,000 to two works of English-language poetry from the previous year — one Canadian and one international. 

The Canadian shortlist:

• Letters in a Bruised Cosmos by Liz Howard
• The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba
• Dream of No One But Myself by D.M. Bradford

The international shortlist:

• Late to the House of Words by Catalan writer Gemma Gorga, translated from Catalan by Sharon Dolin
• Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow by Ukrainian writer Natalka Bilotserkivets, translated from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky
• Sho by American poet Douglas Kearney
• Asked What Has Changed by American poet Ed Roberson

Liz Howard makes the Canadian shortlist for her second consecutive time and for her sophomore book, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos. She won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016 for her debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, and was the award's youngest ever recipient at the time. 

• Griffin Poetry Prize winner Liz Howard on the indelible mark of northern Ontario

The other two books on the Canadian shortlist — The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba and Dream of No One But Myself by D.M. Bradford — are debut collections. Oloruntoba's book has already won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, and both collections are longlisted for League of Canadian Poets Awards this year.

• 22 debut Canadian poetry collections to read for National Poetry Month

The three judges of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, Adam Dickinson from Canada, Valzhyna Mort from Belarus and the U.S. and Claudia Rankine from Jamaica and the U.S., read 639 books of poetry from 16 countries to make the shortlists.

• The CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31, 2022

The two winners will be announced online on Wednesday, June 15.

Read more about all of the finalists below.

Canadian shortlist

Letters in a Bruised Cosmos by Liz Howard

Letters in a Bruised Cosmos entwines histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science to explore the nature of needing and connecting with others. It's a collection that explores family, tragedy, triumph, love and who we become after the worst has happened.

Howard is a poet from Ontario of mixed settler and Anishinaabe ancestry. Her debut poetry collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.

The judges' citation: "Responding to astrophysical evidence of a potential collision between the known universe and a parallel universe, the poems in Liz Howard's powerful collection trace this 'cosmic bruise' as it recurs like an epigenetic expression in family history, intergenerational trauma, and the phenomena of everyday life.

"Like dark matter in the bloodstream, or the star-shaped cells in the brain and spinal cord, the poet carries this vestige within her, observing its shape as a present absence in the spilled ashes of her Indigenous father, or in dissociative childhood experiences of abjection, or in meditations on cognition and Indigenous cosmology. The poems in Letters in a Bruised Cosmos are intimate, astonishing, and moving caresses of the bruise the past makes within and around us, marking the many ways in which 'history is a sewing motion / along a thin membrane'."

The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba

The Junta of Happenstance is an exploration of disease, both medical and emotional. It explores family dynamics, social injustice, the immigrant experience, economic anxiety and the nature of suffering.

The Junta of Happenstance won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and is longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and Raymond Souster Award.

• Tolu Oloruntoba wonders, is the human body a longing machine?

Oloruntoba is a writer from Nigeria who now lives in Surrey, B.C. He practiced medicine for six years, and has harboured a love for writing poetry since he was 16. His first chapbook, Manubrium, was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award. He's also the founder of the literary magazine Klorofyl. His latest book of poetry, Each One a Furnace, was released this year.

The judges' citation: "The Junta of Happenstance, Tolu Oloruntoba's dazzling debut collection, collides the language of revolution with the landscapes of the body. These poems go beyond the desire to ward off death. They emerge out of a life intimate with death's randomness.

"Like the vicissitudes of war, Oloruntoba's poems make peace with accident and fate. They bring breath to survival. 'If the timeline ahead is/ infinitely longer than the/ knives behind, perhaps/ as we set to mending/ we can heal more/ than we ever undid./ But we, too,/ would like a piece of the plunder.' These exquisite poems leave an imprint both violent and terrifyingly beautiful."

Dream of No One but Myself by D.M. Bradford

Dream of No One but Myself is a poetry collection that combines prose poems, verse and collages of family photos to describe what it was like to grow up in a troubled family. In Dream of No One but Myself, D.M. Bradford presents an unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas and domestic tenderness.

Dream of No One but Myself is also longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

• 22 debut Canadian poetry collections to read for National Poetry Month

Bradford is a poet, editor and organizer based in Montreal. His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of House House Press. 

The judges' citation: "Dream of No One but Myself immerses the reader into an archival torrent of intergenerational trauma. This stunning debut never settles for formal complacency as it navigates the rhythmical intelligence of linguistic play, the anguished vigilance of footnotes, and the creased visual proofs of tenderness.

"Amid his troubled subjects, D.M. Bradford's most urgent relationship is with language. The poet's inventive language never slips into just a stunt: it surprises and stirs with its honesty and vulnerability and manages to make whole everything it has so spectacularly torn."

International shortlist

Asked What Has Changed by Ed Roberson

Ed Roberson's Asked What Has Changed addresses the climate change crisis, and how it has shaped the way he writes and moves in the world. "Even staring out the window is changed," the Chicago poet begins, going on in his collection to observe the precariousness of the Earth and the relationship between humanity and nature.

Roberson is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including To See the Earth Before the End of the World, MPH + Selected Motorcycle Poems and The New Wing of the Labyrinth. His work has earned him the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Jackson Poetry Prize and many others. Robertson is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University.

The judges' citation: "Poised between the vertical forces of social inequality and racial injustice, the horizontal sprawl of ghettoized urban growth and environmental degradation, and the temporal trajectories of a glacial past and a climate-changed future, these poems position a poetic eye attuned not only to seeing, 'but with understanding sight.'

"Through inventive language that moves with the sonic beauty and unpredictability of lake breakers, or wheeling swallows, Ed Roberson's Asked What Has Changed is a challenging and urgent interrogation of and reckoning with the history, violence, and revelatory inevitability of interconnectedness between humans and nonhumans. Continuing to expand the possibilities for Black aesthetics and ecopoetics, this book is a crucial contribution to pressing political, artistic, and environmental questions."

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow by Natalka Bilotserkivets, translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow draws from 40 years of work from Ukrainian writer Natalka Bilotserkivets. The collection sheds light on a shrouded history and the control of movement in Ukraine, alongside personally-felt images of childhood, love, wilderness and weather. 

A celebrated poet of Ukraine, Bilotserkivets published her first collection, Ballad about the Invincibles in 1976 when she was a student. Some of her other works include The Underground Fire, November, Allegry and Central Hotel.

Ali Kinsella is a translator of essays, poetry and film subtitles. She lived in Ukraine as an adult and learned the language while there as a Peace Corps volunteer. Kinsella now lives in Chicago. 

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a poet, translator and editor of Four Way Books. Her books include the poetry collection Bad Harvest, a translation of Alexander Dovzhenko's novella The Enchanted Desna and co-translation of Memorials by poet Mieczslaw Jastrun.

The judges' citation: "The lyrical voice of Natalka Bilotserkivets rings, strong and pure, through several generations of Ukrainian poetry, from the Soviet censorship and Chernobyl, to the joys and losses of post-independence. In Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow we get to witness a lifelong bewilderment that transforms the historical into the intimate, with tender and meticulous precision.

"These poems balance thought and emotion on the scales of linguistic music, beautifully captured in English by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bilotserkivets is a poet capable of taking us from the 20th into the 21st century, through the darkness of old and new losses, with the strength refined into grace."

Sho by Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney's Sho is a collection full of wordplay and sleight-of-hand that, precisely used, builds tension as much as humour in each of its poems. The book takes a penetrating look at anti-Black racism, the white gaze and the blurred line between entertainment and exploitation.

Kearney is the author of seven poetry collections and a creative writing teacher at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Some of his other books include Buck Studies, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award and Someone Took They Tongues, a collection of opera libretti.

The judges' citation: "Sho is Douglas Kearney's genius, vulnerability, and virtuosity on full display. These poems live in the rhythms of negotiation and navigation, at the root of saying. They elide, slide, exist in fitful comprehension of our world — where the public and private collide.

"This is work that, even on the page, refuses the page with its 'performative typography.' Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearney's poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearney's body of work to date."

Late to the House of Words by Gemma Gorga, translated by Sharon Dolin

Late to the House of Words collects poems from Gemma Gorga's works from over two decades. The Catalan poet takes a metaphysical approach to explore subjects like sound and language, growth and girlhood, creation and myth.

Gorga is a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature in Barcelona, where she was born. She has written seven collections of poetry in Catalan, including Viatge al centre, Mur and Diafragma.

Sharon Dolin is a New York-based author who has written six poetry collections and also translated Gorga's Book of Minutes. Her poetry books include Manual for Living and Burn and Dodge.

The judges' citation: "Opening with the search 'for some living syllable — sister to bread / and poverty — to bring to our lips,' Gemma Gorga's Late to the House of Words divines its own miraculous sustenance between the vision and the visionary, the physical and the metaphysical. Whether through gnawing on a pencil to find 'the vagus nerve / of the word,' or listening 'to the rotation of sugar / in the cup, the rhythmic dissolution / of one body inside a darker one,' these poems transform the objects and experiences of quotidian encounters into luminous moments of wonder.

"Sharon Dolin's superb translation from Catalan reveals the power of this historically suppressed language, in the hands of a masterful poet, to offer new ways to understand the world where 'home is the incorruptible verticality of the wind,' or 'the moisture every leaf imagines,' or 'the dignity of the body'."