Adebe DeRango-Adem has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Aria Apocalypta.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 16 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 23.

Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka. In 2017, she was picked as a young Black writer to watch by George Elliott Clarke. Her poem, Vox Genus / Provectus, was selected by poet Sonia Sanchez as the winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. DeRango-Adem is the author of three previous full-length poetry books to date: Ex Nihilo, Terra Incognita and The Unmooring. Her fourth and most recent collection, Vox Humana was nominated for a ReLit Award and won the 2023 Raymond Souster Award. Selections from Vox were developed into an original choral composition during her 2023 residency with the Choral Creation Lab, in collaboration with fellow resident composers and the Amadeus Choir of Toronto.

"Livid hymn for world endings."

"Questioning the notion of poetry as safe haven or reflective art; doubting the notion of suffering as salvific; curious as to life's meaning in times of brutal chaos; attempting to speak to these unprecedented times of reckoning upon reckoning via language and voice and wondering if words can be enough. Where has all the reckoning gotten us? We are living through a paradigm of violence. There are so many things we can't unsee. But this is part of apocalypse, from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning 'revelation' or 'uncovering.' We are at a breaking point; how do we (find the words to) hold on?"

ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA* say the ghost ships beached fish

do you remember

the time we fell in love by message

in a bottle

when glass

floating

on sea-

water was a

humane

gift

now look what we done with all that

manifesting & abundance mindset

it will never be enough

to die for

this world

*An alert code for an emergency aboard a ship (the language for these codes is meant to be neutral, to avoid raising concerns amongst passengers)

The winner of the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a writing residency and have their work published on CBC Books. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

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