Congratulations to the 2022 Winner of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award!

Fresh Air by Gordon Taylor

About the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award

A $500 prize, sponsored by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Foundation, to the best single poem by a poet in the early stages of their career. 

Thank you to the contest judges, Concetta Principe and Stuart Ian McKay. 

Gordon Taylor (he/him) is a queer poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology, health care and poetry. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Grain, Rattle, Event, Banshee, Descant and Plenitude. In his spare time Gordon is a volunteer reader for Five South Magazine.

Fresh Air
by Gordon Taylor

Do I love you
more than I
love
an ampersand
that joins everything
we think can’t be
joined, two
part harmony
& the pigeon
that pooped
in my tea
as I walked
this morning,
font & Font
serif & fountain
twitchy twitter
alter egos, hash
tags & pink mini
marshmallows,
green pulsing
northern lights,
asbestos threads
in ancient linoleum,
silence & swimming
pools & arms
twining almost
an eight, but
not quite, bone,
salt & jasmine, you,
careless and care
less, chemotherapy
& hot chocolate,
ozone & blue
burial shrouds,
lobsters & blood,
riots & purple
hibiscus, me &
you, memory, scars,
river stones, our
asymmetrical lungs.

Honourable Mentions

(in no particular order)

Diving Birds by Catherine St. Denis

Here, Grass by Farah Ghafoor

Florivore by Masa Torbica

Mystics by Hannah Siden

This Arrival Poem by Jason Coombs

About the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto 

 On a blustery March night in 1908, a group of writers, musicians, architects, academics and supporters of the arts, encouraged by Augustus Bridle, a journalist covering the arts beat, met to found an organization committed to championing of the arts in English-speaking Canada: The Arts & Letters Club of Toronto. 

Celebrating both the creative and performing arts — and equally devoted to spirited, sometimes biased and often hilarious argument — the Arts & Letters Club quickly became a forcing-ground for ideas in all artistic disciplines. Into the Club’s embrace came people who would become prime movers in creating the artistic culture we enjoy today: great names such as Robertson Davies, Vincent Massey, Marshall McLuhan, Eden Smith, Wyly Grier, Ernest MacMillan, Mavor Moore and many, many more. Their contributions to the arts in Canada are legendary. 

The avowed purpose of the club was to be a rendezvous for people of diverse interests to meet for mutual fellowship and artistic creativity. It was to become a “comradely haven for kindred souls.”