The best Canadian poetry of 2023
Here's our list of this year's best Canadian poetry collections!
Wires that Sputter by Britta Badour
Britta Badour's debut collection of poetry, Wires that Sputter, explores topics like pop culture, sports, family dynamics and Black liberation.
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Britta Badour's powerful poetry is inspired by her family, community and her experience of Blackness
Badour, better known as Britta B., is an artist, public speaker and poet living in Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation. She teaches spoken word performance at Seneca College.
Chaotic Good by Sabrina Benaim
Acclaimed spoken-word poet Sabrina Benaim brings a layer of levity to life with her poetry and story collection Chaotic Good. With ruminations on skincare to words expressing her love of Beyoncé, Chaotic Good is all about what it means to find yourself in a chaotic world.
- Sabrina Benaim went viral for her poem about depression — but she wants you to know she's also funny
Benaim is a Toronto-based poet, storyteller and workshop facilitator. She's known for her well-viewed spoken word poems and her bestselling collection Depression & Other Magic Tricks.
Bottom Rail on Top by D.M. Bradford
Bottom Rail on Top is a collection of poems which embodies the Black histories of antebellum life and emancipation in America. Bottom Rail on Top meditates on lineage and legacy through poetic fragments.
D.M. Bradford is a Montreal-based poet and translator. Their other books include Dream of No One but Myself, which won the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and their translated book House Within a House.
Lent by Kate Cayley
Lent is built from the tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary — large and small — converges in the home, in small objects, conversations and moments. This collection is a work of our era, asking us to contemplate what it means to live in a broken world — and why we still find it beautiful.
Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, playwright and poet based in Toronto. She is also the author of the YA novel The Hangman in the Mirror, the poetry collections When This World Comes to an End and Other Houses, and the short story collections How You Were Born and Householders.
Cayley made the longlist for the 2016 CBC Short Story Prize and the 2013 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Writers' Bedrooms.
States of Emergency by Yoyo Comay
States of Emergency is a book-length poem that examines the apocalyptic nature of the present day using language both prophetic and colloquial.
Comay is a Toronto-based poet and musician. His EP, Crushed, was released under the name Sufferin Mall in 2022. His work has be published in The Peripheral Review, Commo Mag, Touch the Donkey, Metatron Press and Small Walker Press. States of Emergency is his first poetry collection.
Muster Points by Lucas Crawford
Muster Points is about queer love, kink, depression and pleasure. Chronicling periods of Crawford's life while quarantined in the mountains at the beginning of the pandemic, Muster Points is about his experiences as a genderqueer guy journeying through the ruins of heterosexual culture, remaking masculinity and the fluidity of both queer love and regret.
Crawford is a writer and Canada Research Chair of Transgender Creativity and Mental Health at the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta. Crawford's poetry collection Belated Bris of the Brainsick won the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award at the 2020 Atlantic Book Awards. Crawford is also the author of the poetry collections Sideshow Concessions and The High Line Scavenger Hunt. The poet was a 2020 CBC Poetry Prize reader.
After That by Lorna Crozier
Acclaimed Canadian poet Lorna Crozier lost her longtime partner, fellow poet Patrick Lane, in 2019. In her poetry collection, After That, Crozier examines immense grief and loss and highlights the beauty of sorrow and the magic you find in everyday life.
Crozier is a Governor General's Literary Award-winning poet who has written more than 15 books. She won the 1987 CBC Poetry Prize for Angels of Silence. Her other poetry collections include God of Shadows and What the Soul Doesn't Want.
Pronounced / Workable by Candace de Taeye
Pronounced / Workable is a poetry collection that draws from medical protocols, legislative acts and patient quotes. The poems are inspired by Candace de Taeye's experience working 12-hour shifts as a paramedic in Toronto and explore themes of food, opportunistic creatures, tragedy and apathy while referencing specific Toronto landmarks.
Pronounced / Workable was nominated for a 2023 ReLit Award.
Candace de Taeye is a Guelph-based writer and a paramedic. Her poetry has been published in Arc, Bad Nudes, CNQ, CV2, Grain, Joypuke, Meat for Tea and Vallum. She's also published chapbooks Roe and The Ambulance Act.
Elements by Jamesie Fournier, translated by Jaypeetee Arnakak
Elements is a debut collection of bilingual verse about the complex experiences of an Inuk writer. Following one interior voice, Elements evokes themes of resistance, darkness and erasure.
Jamesie Fournier is an Inuk author who has been published in Inuit Art Quarterly and the anthology Coming Home: Stories from the Northwest Territories. He has also written the novel The Other Ones. He currently lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
Jaypeetee Arnakak is a translator and former policy analyst with a focus on Inuit culture. He has adapted several picture books, including The Woman and Her Bear Club and The Story of the Loon and the Raven.
Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill, translated by Kristen Renee Miller
Heating the Outdoors is a collection of micropoems that explore love and writing as decolonial resilience. Marie-Andrée Gill examines her interior world of heartbreak, love and loss through examining the historical subjugation and reclamation of land and language.
Marie-Andrée Gill combines her Quebec and Ilnu identities through her writing. In 2018, Gill won an Indigenous Voices Award. She is also the author of the poetry collections Spawn, Béante and Chauffer le dehors.
Kristen Renee Miller is a writer and translator currently living in Kentucky. She previously translated Gill's poetry collection Spawn.
Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green
Xanax Cowboy is a poetry collection that follows the adventures of the Xanax Cowboy, a pill-popping, whiskey drinking woman with a reputation like a rattlesnake.
Xanax Cowboy won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
Hannah Green is a Winnipeg-based writer and poetry editor. She was a poetry finalist for the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.
Crushed Wild Mint by Jess Housty
Crushed Wild Mint is a sensory exploration of land and ancestral knowledge based on Jess Housty's own connection to Indigenous lands. Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of conversations between Housty and elements of nature like the mountains and animals, and it explores the past, potential futures and humanity at large.
Housty is a writer and grassroots activist of Heiltsuk and mixed settler heritage. They are based in their unceded ancestral territory within Bella Bella, B.C., where they are a community herbalist and educator.
Old Gods by Conor Kerr
Old Gods is a poetry collection in motion. From coyotes that race through the night to buses that drive from region to region or people that search for lost loves on the Internet, Conor Kerr's book is a meditation on the travels humans and animals take over time. The poet places readers in the "Métis mindset," showing that wherever one is in the natural world, there is life in the rivers, the hills and the prairies we travel on.
Old Gods was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
Kerr is a Métis and Ukrainian educator, writer and harvester. He is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and is descended from the Gladue, Ginther and Quinn families from the Lac Ste. Anne and Fort Des Prairies Métis communities and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His poem Prairie Ritual was on the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize longlist.
Kerr won the 2022 Novel ReLit Award for his debut novel Avenue of Champions, which was also longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize and a finalist for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
Baby Book by Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Baby Book locates mundane and everyday experiences, such as a family vacation via bus tour, to discuss how belief systems are first formed and how everything we know about power, death, life and property can be formed and reformed again and again.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is a Toronto-based artist and writer. She is the author of Looty Goes to Heaven. Baby Book is her first collection of poetry and was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
archipelago by Laila Malik
archipelago is a collection of lyrical poems exploring family dynamics and self-identity in the face of multigenerational migration.
Laila Malik is a writer living in Adobigok, the traditional land of Indigenous communities that include the Anishinaabe, Seneca, Mohawk Haudenosaunee, and Wendat. archipelago is her debut poetry collection.
Sonnets from a Cell by Bradley Peters
In his debut collection, Sonnets from a Cell, Bradley Peters writes from personal experiences as a young man in the Canadian prison system. Combining lyrical verse with inmate speech, Sonnets from a Cell offers empathy and grace within moments of isolation and fear.
Peters is a poet and actor currently based in Mission, B.C. His poetry has been featured in numerous literary magazines. Sonnets from a Cell is his debut poetry collection.
Way to Go by Richard Sanger
In Way to Go, Richard Sanger uses poetry to explore his passions, give gratitude and provide humourous observations about a life well-lived.
Sanger was a writer who grew up in Ottawa and lived in Toronto. He published three poetry collections and a chapbook. His plays included Not Spain, Two Words for Snow, Hannah's Turn, and Dive. He has also published essays, reviews and poetry translations.
The Mask by Terry Watada
The Mask is a poetry collection titled after both the emblem of the 2020 pandemic and as a significant cultural symbol in Japan. Terry Watada's poems are centred around themes of loss, the mystical and the reality of being an immigrant in Canada.
Watada is a poet and writer currently based in Toronto. He is the author of many books including his novels The Three Pleasures and The Blood of Foxes. His play, Sakura: the Last Cherry Blossom Festival will premiere in 2024.
