Cassandra Myers has made the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Brain Spike for the Second Mouth.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to attend a two-week 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 work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 18 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 24.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January and the CBC Poetry Prize opens in April.

Cassandra Myers is a queer, non-binary and disabled South Asian and Italian performance poet and counsellor from Toronto. Raised in the slam poetry community for seven years, they have earned titles such as the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion. As she transitioned to the written word, her work has won the ARC Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year Award 2021 and the Reader's Choice Award. Their first collection of poems, Smash the Headlights, is forthcoming from Write Bloody North Publishing.

"There's no easy slow death."

"After watching a Vice Media mini documentary on Ikejime, I couldn't stop thinking about the similarities between an animal's stress response and the links to my current experiences with vulvodynia after sexual violence."

Most fish are killed the same way. Latticed from the water. Ice-bedded and left to open
their gills to an empty so final it crushes the wedding arch within them.
The hook hasn't discovered yet if and how fish feel pain, but it's confirmed,
with a mouthful of lox, that fish do feel stress.

Five minutes to a few hours of wind-gasping for a fish to submit
to the whites of its eyes. When a fish is wrestling in death's tulle skirt,
it's exercising.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January. The 2022 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.