Gillian Sze, Matthew James Weigel and Alycia Pirmohamed among poets nominated for 2023 Canadian poetry prizes
CBC Books | CBC Books | Posted: April 24, 2023 3:19 PM | Last Updated: April 24, 2023
The League of Canadian Poets reveal their 2023 shortlists
Gillian Sze, Matthew James Weigel and Alycia Pirmohamed are just a few of the authors nominated for the 2023 League of Canadian Poets' Book Awards.
The organization annually administers three poetry prizes to celebrate the year's best published works — the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for debut books, Pat Lowther Memorial Award for books by Canadian women and Raymond Souster Award for books by League members.
The winner of each prize receives $2,000.
Sze has been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Quiet Night Think, which is a collection of personal essays and poems that reflect on her familiar and artistic origins. The book moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, as Sze meditates on ideas of emergence and transformation.
"The true power of the book lies not in any one genre or subject, but in the spaces between them – the spaces in which Sze unearths unexpected connections and meaning. As she writes about the exhaustive haze of new motherhood, those first few weeks spent 'sitting inside the moon,' Sze's spare, unflinching lines draw our attention to the in-between moments of life, the concentric circles of becoming," said the jurors in a statement.
Sze is a poet from Winnipeg. She is the author of multiple poetry collections, as well as the 2021 children's book The Night is Deep and Wide. Sze lives in Montreal.
Alberta poet Weigel's Whitemud Walking has received two nominations. It is on the shortlist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Raymond Souster Award. Whitemud Walking examines the violent dispossession of Indigenous people from the land using photography and nonfiction prose alongside poetry.
The jurors called the book a " masterclass in experimental form" and said, "you do not just read this book but experience it with your mind, heart and spirit."
Weigel is a Dene and Métis poet and artist. His chapbook It Was Treaty / It Was Me won the 2020 Vallum Chapbook Award. His work has appeared in Arc, The Polygot and The Mamawi Project. Whitemud Walking was also a finalist for the 2022 Dayne Ogilvie Prize.
Pirmohamed made the Raymond Souster Award shortlist for her book Another Way To Split Water, a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory transforms across generations, through stories told and retold. This collection touches on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy and the natural world.
The jury said, "Another Way To Split Water is affecting, refined, and elusive in its invocations of environmentalism, circumventing cliché through sprezzatura … every line is a reminder of the infinite ways to assemble a clause, every line ripples with wisdom, every line is a lyrical swim."
Pirmohamed is an Edmonton-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the chapbooks Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative essay Second Memory, which was co-authored with Pratyusha.
Pirmohamed was winner of the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize for Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih.
Winners of the League of Canadian Poets' Book Awards will be announced on May 4, 2023. See all of the shortlists below.
The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut book:
- MONUMENT by Manahil Bandukwala
- Transcribing Moonlight by Skylar Kay
- Orion Sweeping by Anne Marie Todkill
- Shapeshifters by Délani Valin
- My Grief, the Sun by Sanna Wani
- Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award for books by Canadian women:
- Tender by Sylvia D. Hamilton
- Shadow Blight by Annick MacAskill
- HARROWINGS by Cecily Nicholson
- A Is for Acholi by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
- Boat by Lisa Robertson
- Quiet Night Think by Gillian Sze
The Raymond Souster Award for best book by a member of the League of Canadian Poets:
- Vox Humana by Adebe DeRango-Adem
- Shifting Baseline Syndrome by Aaron Kreuter
- Another Way To Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed
- Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems by Olive Senior
- Grappling Hook by Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
- Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel
Last year Undoing Hours by Selina Boan won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett was awarded the Raymond Souster Award and Alisa Kaplan won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for her debut poetry collection Qorbanot: Offerings.