SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY

Shortlisted for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Finalist for the 2014 Goldie Awards: Poetry Category

Moving from the Enlightenment science of natural history to the contemporary science of global warming, Light Light is a provocative engagement with the technologies and languages that shape discourses of knowing. It bridges the histories of botany, empire, and mind to take up the claim of "objectivity" as the dissolution of a discrete self and thus explores the mind's movement toward and with the world. The poems in Light Light range from the epigrammatic to the experimental, from the narrative to the lyric, consistently exploring the way language captures the undulation of a mind’s working, how that rhythm becomes the embodiment of thought, and how that embodiment forms a politics engaged with the environment and its increasing alterations.

---

Praise for Light Light:

The 19th-century Romantic poets, who are cited in Light Light, rhapsodized about nature as separate from humankind; in this era of climate change, Joosten reminds us there is no separation. – The Toronto Star

Light Light puts the hive back in the archive, the source in the resource. Through Joosten's miraculous mode of attending, through this mind that "grounds sound to seed," we are elemented – "The mind is a mood of electricity, warmth, water, and wind." We are given a mode of attending that is precarious, is an enactment of the precariousness we are and, with consequence, institute. Each thing this attention falls upon "is a source of thought, not its object." So everything is light once we learn to see by it. To honor the field we should “leave the field,” but this book we should never leave.

– Jane Gregory

A concordance that emerges as material, thought, and material thought, Julie Joosten's Light Light is a most beautiful and rare breed: as if H.D.'s Sea Garden mated with Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants. "I was to guard the valley, name it, speak to it by name," Joosten writes. Hers is a haunting lament. It is what love is. What could be more necessary at this time on this planet?

– Cara Benson

To get to the heart of Light Light is to ask whether these poems work, do they entertain, do they excite, do they teach, do they illuminate? Yes, yes, yes and yes again.

– Michael Dennis

Light Light is not light, but light-filled. Philosophical, lyrical, inventive, and erudite, precise and startlingly perceptive, it invites the reader to attend to wonder.

– Judges citation from The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award jury

---

Fracking – tar-sand runoff – dirty oil extraction. This is the language of our oil-addicted 21st century society: incredibly invasive, blatant in its purpose, and richly embedded in mythological and archetypal symbolism. The ultimate goal of the industry: To core the underworld.

Endangered Hydrocarbons, Lesley Battler's first full-length collection of poetry, shows that the language of hydrocarbon extraction, with its blend of sexual imagery, archetype, science, pseudoscience and the purely speculative, can be as addictive as the resource it pursues.

Using pastiche and wordplay, Battler shines a floodlight on the absurdity and pervasiveness of production language in all areas of human life in the oil fields, including art, culture and politics. Incorporating texts generated by a multinational oil company, and spliced with a variety of found material (video games, home decor magazines, works by Henry James and Carl Jung), Battler deliberately tampers with her found material, treating it as crude oil—excavating, mixing, and drilling these texts to emulate extraction processes used by the industry.With traces of Dennis Lee's Testament, Larissa Lai's Automaton Biographies, and Adam Dickinson's The Polymers, this lively and refreshing take on a polarizing topic will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry who connect with environmental issues and capitalist critique.

---

PRAISE FOR LESLEY BATTLER

Electric and unexpected... Lesley Battler's "Idylls of Inuvik" [is] a zinger of a poem that uses the internal, molecular energy of words to enact a merciless takedown of the still-colonial attitudes at play in the economics of Canada's North.

—Anita Lahey, Arc Poetry Magazine

Lesley Battler's cut-up work will continue to remind me that it will always be easier to remove overburden than it will be to clear-cut a small forest. Her work brings us the spectacle of the wars of rhetoric—with their victors & victims of ideology, hijacking knowledge and power with 'approved terms of vocabulary.

— Paul Zits, filling Station

---

When Andy Warhol's a, A Novel was first published in 1968, The New York Times Book Review declared it "pornographic." Yet over four decades later, a continues to be an essential documentation of Warhol's seminal Factory scene. And though the book offers a pop art snapshot of 1960s Manhattan that only Warhol could capture, it remains a challenging read. Comprised entirely of unedited transcripts of recorded conversations taped in and around the Warhol Factory, the original book's tone varies from frenetic to fascinating, unintelligible to poetic.

No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol by Liz Worth attempts to change that, by appropriating the original text and turning each page into a unique poem. In remixing a into poetry using only words and phrases from each piece's specified page, Worth sets the scene for the reader, not unlike eavesdropping in an all-night diner, with poetry full of voices competing to be heard, hoping for just a sliver of attention at the end of a long, desperate night.

True to Worth's style, the poems in this collection hiss and pop with confessional whispers while maintaining the raw, distorted qualities originally captured on tape and documented in a, A Novel. Warhol fans, archivists, and academics, as well as readers of confessional and conceptual poetry and fiction, will jump at the chance to be a part of the Factory in-crowd in No Work Finished Here.

---

Praise for No Work Finished Here:

"Liz Worth’s collection of poems is a testament to both her artistry and daily discipline. In an age of diminished attention, her perseverance in daily poem-making by mining the same source over and over reminds us that artists can be a model of life without distraction—how to go deeper and deeper until you find yourself looking back at you." —Heath Allen, composer Andy, A popera

Praise for Liz Worth:

"If one were to rip the cupcake niceties and corporate regimens from society and present a poetic and existential depiction of the anarchical remains, then that would be PostApoc. Liz Worth's tour de force of vivid prose and stunning visceral imagery will haunt you long after you've read the final chapter. Thought-provoking, powerful and inspiring, this book calls for multiple reads." –Lisa de Nikolits, author of The Hungry Mirror, West of Wawa and A Glittering Chaos

"Whether it be poetry, performance art, or prose, Liz Worth has the uncanny ability to turn the grotesque and profane into something sublime and sensual. With PostApoc, she has taken this to a higher level by solidifying her unique voice and bringing rock 'n' roll to its logical dystopian conclusion." —Brandon Pitts, author, playwright, and poet

"The end of the world is not a new idea. Liz Worth writes as if it were. You come away gasping. Begging for hope. Begging for happiness. Begging for the sanctuary of the unreal. PostApoc makes Cormac's The Road seem paved with yellow brick. You'll need more air after reading this." —Bob Bryden, singer-songwriter, founding member of Christmas, Reign Ghost, Benzene Jag, and Age of Mirrors

---

Mallory Tater's This Will Be Good tells the story of a young woman’s burgeoning femininity as it brushes up against an emerging eating disorder. As the difficulties of her disease reveal themselves, they ultimately disrupt family relationships and friendships.

These poems deftly bear witness to the performance of femininity and gender construction to reveal the shrinking mind and body of a girl trying to find her place in the world, and whose overflowing adolescent hope for a future will not subside.

---

Praise for This Will Be Good:

"This Will Be Good is a prayer, vicious and sweet. Tater's dexterous language shreds the pink ribbons of nostalgia to remind that girlhood is both 'sugared with fear' and 'diamond-hard.'" —Adèle Barclay, author of If I Were In a Cage I'd Reach Out For You

"This Will Be Good details the truths of girlhood; how young women treat themselves with cruelty and tenderness, fend off and court desire, and brace themselves for a world that both expects too much of them and yet never enough. These poems unfold as stories girls tell each other as they make space to share, cope, grieve, and hopefully, heal." —Dina Del Bucchia, author of Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items and Don't Tell Me What to Do

"Evocative and tactile as unearthed memory, This Will Be Good follows the history of a family through years, homes, seasons, and bodies. They're death and grief, sex and religion. A reckoning with womanhood, manhood, and memory, these stories have a feeling of being passed down, kept secret, and slipped in notes and gestures between intimates whose closeness is felt on the skin. Press these words to your breast." —Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star and Sunshine State

---

Adrienne Gruber's third full poetry collection, Q & A, is a poetic memoir detailing a first pregnancy, birth and early postpartum period. The poet is both traumatized and transformed by the birth of her daughter. She is compelled by the dark places birth takes her and as she examines and revisits those places, a grotesque history of the treatment of pregnant and birthing women reveals itself.

---

Praise for Q & A:

"To give birth, to bear life—to release and capture that experience in words: this is the crystalline achievement of Q & A. Gruber's poetry resonates in the hollows of my body, in the fear and hope that accompanies motherhood." —Marianne Apostolides, author of Deep Salt Water

"In Q&A Adrienne Gruber annotates the condition of the pre- and post-partum body, training her ruthless poetic eye on division: cell by cell, mother from daughter, fact from misguided historical tendency. Is this a love poem / or a poem of grief? / When we make something / we lose, she writes. Throughout these poems and their namesake childhood interrogatives, fluids course, sutures tear, ducts leak. Gruber's ability to command the language of sublime physicality draws motherhood's grotesque fears close, turning them over like an infant on a lap, examining perfections and dangers with intimate scrutiny." —Elee Kraljii Gardiner, author of Trauma Head and serpentine loop

---

Winner, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Longlisted, 2018 League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award

Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader's attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia's coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.

This astonishing debut, at once spare and lush, displays an exquisite lyricism built on musical lines and mature restraint. Nilsen turns over each idea carefully, letting nothing escape her attention and saying no more than must be said. Combining a scientist's precision and a poet's sensitivity, Otolith examines the ache of nostalgia in the relentless passage of time.

---

"Otolith is a house built by gravity and movement, at once weighty and ephemeral. These poems are fogged in and present, placed and displaced. Nilsen is a poet of the interstitial, of longing, of the sensitive shift itself."

---

"Spend enough time at a remote research station, suggests Emily Nilsen, and you, too, will identify fifty different species of fog. In Otolith, Nilsen’s poems measure all that environmental science cannot: the alignment of a tree planter’s sensibility to charred forest, the geolocation of grief. Wake before dawn and follow Nilsen’s ‘solitary, rugged route’ into our fragile ecology."

---

"Otolith challenges the idea that madness is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. With metaphors and imagery as wild as the ecologies she encounters, Emily Nilsen shows that repeating the same question can yield multiple answers: Otolith’s world is not static, won’t hold still for its photograph, doesn’t sit pretty. And this is its virtue."

---

Welcome to Kate Hargreaves' Leak, where the relationship between language and the body lives in the bumps and bruises that in turn become new ways of understanding the borders and leaks of our everyday existence. In Leak, bodies lose pieces and fall apart, while words slip out of place and letters drop away. Emergency room signage becomes incomprehensible, the census requests bodily measurements, a cyclist confuses oil with her own blood. This visceral deconstruction of the body and its multiple representations tests the boundaries of body politics — pathologically, emotionally, and lyrically.

---

Praise for Leak:

Inside Kate Hargreaves's stunning new book, words bite and yawn and breathe the page, chipping away at the dictionary, diagnosing the alphabet. A tour de aperture, these poems will leak from your tongue into your brain, gushing pleasure: pleasure: pleasure: pleasure.

– Nicole Markotic

With deliberate caprice, Kate Hargreaves executes, deranges, disentangles, fractures, accidenting language into dazzling constellations.

– Rosemary Nixon

Leak is an exciting poetic debut which performs a relentless and passionate anatomy through syntax that spills, kicks, craves, bloats, sheds, and spits. Hargreaves reminds us that, for worse and for better, parts of speech and speaker tend to gurgle beyond their notional grammars. Read it and gush.

– Susan Holbrook

---

Throughout their youth, Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter wrote poetry with their mother, award-winning author Lee Maracle. The three always dreamed that one day they would write a book together. This book is the result of that dream.

The wide-ranging poems in Hope Matters focus on the journey of Indigenous peoples from colonial beginnings to reconciliation. But they also document a very personal journey—that of a mother and her two daughters.

Written collaboratively, Hope Matters offers a blend of three distinct and exciting voices that come together in a shared song of hope and reconciliation.

---

"You need to read this book. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll swear out loud, but mostly you'll be proud of these ladies." —Senator Murray Sinclair

"Daughters and mother poetry dances around each other, weaves rhythm and breathes love. The ancestors sing, babies laugh and hope always wins." —Katherena Vermette, author of The Break and River Woman

"I was captivated by each and every one of these extraordinary poems. Each of the poets is utterly unique and yet there is a striking commonality: commonality of blood, of perspective, and most of all, how the immense power of female desire is expressed through the power and dynamism of the natural world." —Judith Thompson, award-winning author of White Biting Dog and The Other Side of Dark

---

---

---

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 GERALD LAMPAND MEMORIAL AWARD

repeater is a poetic investigation into the coding, function, language, and structure of computer programming. Using the ASCII 8-bit binary code as an acrostic, each lower-case letter of the alphabet is arranged alongside the lines of the title poem. As a result, this poem "programs" an investigation of layered and digitalized language that is coded into the heart of the code itself. Appendixes to this code form supplementary studies, and deviate into additional problems and concepts at the convergence of poetry and computer programming. Ultimately, repeater reveals what happens when the creative variability of poetry is "inputted" into the rigid binaric structure of computer language.

---

Praise for repeater:

Louis Zukofsky famously located poetry as upper level music, lower level speech. Andrew McEwan’s repeater moves between just those poles. The difference is that McEwan is tracking through the coded moments of a world of language where the lower level operates within the patterns of “information interchange” that increasingly dominate what’s left of the human and “authenticity marks obsolescent outline / to transform the set.” Remarkably, McEwan still makes it sing amidst the “unbound bits [that] float in gravity’s delay.” repeater is a terrific debut book that promises much more to come.

— Michael Boughn

---

In THOU, Aisha Sasha John knows the day – biblically. What if time itself was an object of desire? And the book was a theatre for that? Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time. Which is why she discipled in it. For three years. Also for three months. Also for three months at 33. Ya. Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time and discipled in time, moving it across her body, watching it, um, course the day. She slowed it down and thought along it, she cut it up. She slowed it down and thunk along it and sped it up. She cut it up and spaced it out and rhythmed it down and laid it flat and looked at it hard. Aisha Sasha John has a crush on time. She did it. She did time. It was gross and funny and it was hard and it was good. The result is/was – THOU.

---

Aisha Sasha John’s THOU re-plays that archaic pronoun as a constantly present movement and rhythm of attention: the suddenness of the interpolative “moment.” These lines of poetry “shake...a little” as the “I” narrates and choreographs a monologue of the self in motion; each page is the dance floor and John’s words break through the “I-as-you” with both the foreignicity of anticipation and the reflection of grace.

– Fred Wah

THOU is physical, fearless in its vulnerabilities, a sensing amid thought’s most succulent folds. THOU is a choreography of irresolute bodies, the insistent shifting of their positions. Aisha Sasha John is a poet of centrifugal energy, of reverberant intimacy.

– Michael Nardone

---