Sarah Wolfson has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for After the Storm and Other Poems.

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

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the 2020 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers' Federation. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Walrus, The Yale Review, The Fiddlehead, Geist, TriQuarterly, AGNI, CV2, Prairie Fire and Prism international. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, where she teaches creative writing at McGill University.

"Rhetoric and aesthetics of breaking."

"After the Storm was inspired by reported eyewitness accounts in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. My imagination was stirred by the language people reach for to communicate the staggering immediacy of such destruction. On Breaking and Diseases of Astonishment were also inspired by how we talk about damage and destruction on both larger and smaller scales, including the domestic and the micro-environmental."

We saw the fish flopping in the streets,
the fish we call a shark, the street

we call Fifth Avenue. We knew
we were here for it, the slap, the writhe,

our own envisioned fin and fear,
knew the time had come to register

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.