Susan Paddon has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for The Horse that Dies. The Horse that Lives.

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

Susan Paddon is a fiction and poetry writer. Her first book, Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths won the Atlantic Book Awards' J.M. Abraham Poetry Award and was a finalist for both the ReLit Award and the Raymond Souster Award. Her work has appeared in Best Poetry in Canada, Geist Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Desperately Seeking Susans and The Antigonish Review among others. She lives in Margaree, N.S.

"Aftermath. Hope. Problem with hope."

"This poem is about a lot of things. The first summer I lived in Margaree, there were two horses living on the field right next to our house. One of the horses had heaves and was very sick. At night, I could hear her struggling to breathe. My mother had recently died from pulmonary fibrosis and the laboured breaths of this horse were very hard for me. But the day the horse finally had to be put down, it was the other horse that we immediately had to worry about. He broke fences, kicked violently and wailed. Everything about him changed. At night, I heard him cry from a broken heart. "

Do you believe all this stuff about collective grieving? you ask.

We're sipping cocktails on a patio,

our masks scandalously close. I'm thinking about how

I haven't had the waitressing dream for ages now.

When did we get here? I say.

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.