Kayla Czaga | House of Anansi Press
From the jury: In Midway, Kayla Czaga charms us with her sincerity and humour, and with her ability to transform anything into poetry—from macramé to Marge Simpson to plywood pilgrims with cut-out faces. These poems of grief and adulthood, of hopelessness and hope, are lived-in, immersive and real. Her voice is like the lazy river ride at a waterpark: effortless, steady, carrying us through a spectacle of human strangeness. It is the same accomplished voice she has sustained since her Governor General–nominated debut—and it is the voice of a generation. Midway belongs on everyone’s shelf.
Melanie Siebert | McClelland & Stewart
From the jury: Signal Infinities is an extreme act of empathy and a profoundly ethical gesture towards the “unknowable interiority” of others. These poems embody human suffering and environmental collapse, human resilience and the buoyancy of water. Siebert uses language with skill and urgency to short the circuit between the personal (deeply relatable) and universal (somehow, suddenly, fathomable). It is poetry’s gift to articulate unrecognized connections, and Signal Infinities reads like a revelation – that trauma, systemic injustice, and ecological harms share the same root; and that healing, as a multidimensional and interconnected act, is possible.
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham | McGill-Queen’s University Press
From the jury: In Water Quality, a thoughtfully conceived book of poems that evokes a life that’s lived beside, on, in, and sustained by water, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham is as reflective, honest, and profound as water itself. In these finely tuned poems, she steeps memories of a childhood spent on either shore of the Pacific in Vancouver and Hong Kong, of raising her own children beside the Salish Sea, and of many happy days and weeks spent at the family cottage on a lake just outside Victoria. In a century when too many thirst for and fear running out of water, Woodman Kerkham lets her concern for it take her on an ethical journey about its stewardship, our use and abuse of it, and our sometimes far too watered-down reverence for it. Attentive reading allows these quiet poems about society’s troubling relationship with water to come clear. Look long and deep: in the mirror that Water Quality holds up, you may well see the role you play in water’s story.
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