Jordan Mounteer has made the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Northwestern Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos caurinus).

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.

Jordan Mounteer is a psychotherapist who lives and works in the Kootenays on the unceded and traditional territories of the Sinixt First Nation. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including the Fiddlehead, the Dalhousie Review and Grain Magazine. He was previously shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, the Montreal Poetry Contest, the Malahat Review's Open Season Awards and CV2's Young Buck Poetry Prize. Mounteer won Prism's Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, the Adirondack Review's 46er Poetry Prize and Glass Buffalo's Poetry Contest. His first book, liminal, came out in 2017 with SonoNis Press.

"Meditation, mortality, memory and meaning."

"The difficulty in tracing inspiration is the same difficulty in delineating the origins of a watershed. Even if there's a focal stream, an arterial thread that can lead you from one image or idea or stanza to the next, what makes up that stream is multitudinous and branched, and demands as much acknowledgement as the whole into which it feeds. Which is to say it would take me pages to account for all the reasons why crows make good subject matter — biologically, behaviourally, linguistically, anthropologically and mythologically — but maybe underlying all those motivations is something to do with the craft of poetry itself.

"I have increasingly found that whatever accounts for poetic sensibility tends to be on equal terms with philosophical sensibility, and part of the challenge of both is finding new ways to ask old questions. Crows seem like the perfect vehicle for this sort of task because they come to a poem already equipped with so much connotative baggage and metaphorical meaning. So, their presence in any writing also amounts to a dare — how do you convey something so easily relegated to a cliché in a way that feels fresh, accessible and seditious? The crow is an ultimatum to the poet to pervert expectations and invert convention."

I

When they gather in the empty
cherry trees like a black foliage, they might

as well be a shadow of everything
that goes missing in winter months

(leftovers, wool socks, murders).
Accurate as negative space

when it comes to making sense
of what is left unsaid about violence

when everything else has.
Let us keep the different ways

we mourn the catalogue of unspeakable
losses always on the tips of our tongues,

let that restraint be the surface
tension of birds that keeps the city

from overflowing
its edges.

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.