Mark Wagenaar has made the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Migrations.

Mark Wagenaar is the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, most recently the Saltman Prize-winning Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, which contains the 2015 CBC Poetry Prize-winning poem String Theory. A father of two and husband of poet Chelsea Wagenaar, he is an assistant professor at Valparaiso University, in Indiana.

Tracing the movements of people.

"This poem begins with a child — my child — moving into language, then charts the migrations of various people, animals, phenomena and, finally, the speaker's life."

Sparrow, I answer, when our two year old
points to the tea towel & asks—already
she's moved from bird to robin, cardinal,
etc, & now sparrow, already the language
fails us. I say sparrow & mean so much more
than little song—finchlike gleaner, doubled
achene, scrabbler, driveway dust bather,
passerine keener of the near-at-hand, even
Egyptian hieroglyph, even Christ-lesson

The winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, will have their work published on CBC Books and will have the opportunity to attend a writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their story published on CBC Books.