2015 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2015 Book Awards Winners, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
Learn more about the 2015 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2014:
Congratulations to the winners, shortlisters, longlisters and publishers!
2015 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
Awarded annually since 1981, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized author tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes a first book of poetry published by a Canadian writer in the preceding year. The award carries a $2000 prize and is sponsored by the LCP.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2015 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Sonja Greckol, Charles Mountford and David Seymour.
Winner
Kayla Czaga – For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions)
From the jurors
Kayla Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On moves line by flawless line along an arc in | from broken bodies through re | construction into troubled and troubling metaphor. In this first collection, which offers the reader a growth project, a deeply embodied girl child and young woman meets her world (personal and literary) with sly and contemplative thought that experiments with itself. Czaga unfurls experience, observation and development with complexity and more that a little humour suspending a reader between this page’s moment of assurance and the next moment’s unsettling observation. This work is a thrill.
About Kayla Czaga
Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat, BC, and currently lives in Vancouver, where she recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She won The Malahat Review’s 2012 Far Horizons Award for Poetry and The Fiddlehead’s 23rd Annual Ralph Gustafson Prize. For Your Safety Please Hold On is her first book
About For Your Safety Please Hold On
For Your Safety Please Hold On is a truly remarkable first poetry collection from debut talent Kayla Czaga. Her poems are already making waves–several from this collection have received award attention, including: The Fiddlehead‘s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review‘s 2012 Far Horizon’s Award for Poetry and an Editor’s Choice Award in ARC Poetry Magazine’s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for The New Quarterly‘s 2013 Occasional Verse Contest, longlisted for CBC’s 2013 Canada Writes Poetry Contest and have appeared in literary publications across North America.
The poems in For Your Safety Please Hold On move in thematic focus from family, to girlhood, to adulthood, each permeated by Czaga’s lively voice and quick-witted, playful language. They test the line between honest humour and bitter reality in a sophisticated, incisive manner that tugs at the gut and feels true.
The linguistic hopscotch of Czaga’s poems about girlhood is often beautifully juxtaposed with feelings of menace or a first taste of smothering expectations–“She sits. She sips her bright pink fingers. / She slips into smart short haircuts, yes, / she does so, and does herself up just so.” While her pin prick meditations on contemporary adulthood suggest a yearning for personal meaning and purpose on a larger scale–“I still wander, sometimes, / my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets / full of garbage, with my slender steady want. I still / make the bed and at bedtime unmake it.”
The irrepressible energy of the poems in For Your Safety Please Hold On, paired with their complex balancing act between light and dark, humour and melancholy, innocence and danger, make this collection an extraordinary first offering.
2015 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a woman in Canada, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $2,000 prize. This award is inclusive of trans women and non-binary individuals who feel comfortable being recognized by a women’s prize.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Di Brandt, Candice James and Concetta Principe.
Winner
Sina Queyras – MxT (Coach House Books)
From the jurors
Sina Queyras mystically sews the ghost to the body, the dead to the living, the thread of ‘what if ’ to the cloth of ‘it is’. The dialogues with the dead are softly honed into majestic surreal sculptures as Queyras paints us into a different kind of reality alive with the dead and scriptures of the third kind. A thrilling fusion of defiance and vulnerability, and quirky humour. Experimental writing with a lot of heart.
About Sina Queyras
Sina Queyras is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Lemon Hound, Expressway (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award), and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award). She often writes for the Poetry Foundation and runs the online journal Lemon Hound.
About MxT
MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.
2015 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD WINNER
The Raymond Souster Award was started in 2013 to honour Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award is presented annually for a book of poetry by a League member published in the preceding year. The award carries a $2000 prize, and is sponsored by the LCP.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2015 Raymond Souster Award: Micheline Maylor, Susan McMaster and D.C. Reid.
Rachel Zolf – Janey’s Arcadia (Coach House Books)
From the jurors
An experimental book so good, it is the textbook for the next decade. If you want to find the edge, and write there, read this book. Ostensibly retelling the benign settling of Manitoba by non-aboriginals and their Ministers, it is a text of brutal irony, distorted racist interactions, the repeated questioning: ‘Who Is This Jesus?’ and rape in his name. Its OCRed text of historical government pamphlets is further distorted by intentional misspellings, inserted puns on puns, resulting in more bangs per line than any other book
you will read this year, and wickedly, subversively funny
About Rachel Zolf
Rachel Zolf`s writing practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity, and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly
interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her books of poetry include Neighbour Procedure (2010); Human Resources (2007), which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award; Masque (2004), finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; and Her Absence, this wanderer (1999). She has taught at The New School and the University of Calgary
and now lives and works in Toronto
About The Wrong Cat
Like the people and animals in her new collection, Lorna Crozier “defies / the anecdotal, / goes for the lyric, / music made from / bone and muscle and the grace notes” of life. The poems in The Wrong Cat are vintage Crozier: sly, sexy, irreverent, and sad, and populated by fully realized characters whose stories take place in a small lyrical space. We learn about a mother’s last breath, the first dog in heaven, a man’s fear that his wife no longer loves him, and the ways in which animals size up the humans around them and find them wanting. With Crozier’s celebrated mix of vibrant imagery, piercing observations, and deeply felt human emotions, these poems provide an affirmation in the m