Annika Pavlin-Jamal has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Saint-Barthélemy Easter Weekend.

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

Annika Pavlin-Jamal is a student, poet and writer living in Montréal. Her reverence for the power of words drives her passions in poetry, semantics and law. Her work often incorporates themes from her studies, as well as the lived experiences of her friends and family. She is currently working on a collection of poems and plays, as well as a few interview-style non-fiction pieces exploring people's varying definitions of concepts we generally consider to have only one definition.

"Communion, Catharsis, Girlhood; Psychedelic, Nostalgic."

"Always, always, always, I am inspired by my grandmother. If I have not written her presence into a particular poem, then that poem has to be about her absence. With every year, the busier I got, the thinner I stretched myself, I got further away from my hometown and from my grandmother.

"It was late in the evening when I knew I had to write the poem. My friends and I were sitting in the snow outside of a decommissioned paper mill North of Montreal. My soberness had worn off; I felt foreign and exhausted. I felt myself falling from every moment to the next. I was enjoying my time with my friends immensely, but I was missing home dearly. If I am so young, I thought to myself, why does it feel like I've spent an eternity away from home?

"All the while, this pleasant glow burned from within the mill like a lit match sticking out of the snow. Thomas' sister and her best friend were cutting up fruit for us. I saw the mill as a respite from the rest of the world: a place to get to, to rest and recoup, a place like grandma. This poem is about coming back to yourself after tragedy, coming back to your ancestors, and coming back into the warmth."

driving along the sister of some lesser-known road, we arrive
at the conclusion that Heaven had never been
where it was supposed to be — It is here, in this deep hearth,
some vestige of the fur trade, whose fantastic
yellows redden and deepen at the slightest whistle or sob

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.