Tolu Oloruntoba, Hoa Nguyen, Louise Bernice Halfe among poets longlisted for League of Canadian Poets prizes
The League of Canadian Poets reveal their 2022 longlists
Tolu Oloruntoba's The Junta of Happenstance, Hoa Nguyen's A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure and Louise Bernice Halfe - Sky Dancer's awâsis — kinky and dishevelled are among the poetry books longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets' annual book awards.
The organization administers three poetry prizes to celebrate the year's best published works — the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for debut books, Pat Lowther Memorial Award for books by Canadian women and Raymond Souster Award for books by League members. The winner of each prize receives $2,000.
Tolu Oloruntoba's The Junta of Happenstance picked up two nominations. Drawing from his background in healthcare in Nigeria and Canada, Oloruntoba reflects on social justice, immigration and family dysfunction through the lens of disease.
The Junta of Happenstance is Oloruntoba's debut collection. It previously won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. Oloruntoba is also the author of Each One a Furnace, which was published in March.
Nguyen's A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. The book is a meditation on historical, personal and cultural pressures before and after the fall of Saigon, accompanied by verse biography on the poet's mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe.
The book won the Canada Book Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry and U.S. National Book Award.
Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including As Long As Trees Last and Violet Energy Ingots, which was a finalist for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. She is on the jury panel for the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize.
Halfe's awâsis — kinky and dishevelled is on the longlist for both the Pat Lowther Memorial and Raymond Souster Awards. Her book explores stories of resistance, rebellion and laughter by way of awâsis, a gender-fluid trickster character who takes readers on a humorous journey of mystery and spirituality.
Halfe is Canada's ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Her previous acclaimed books include Burning in this Midnight Dream, Bear Bones & Feathers, Blue Marrow and The Crooked Good.
First-time author Rebecca Salazar picked up two nominations for sulphurtongue. The wide array of poems explores how we create our identities and how they collide with and complicate each other. They take on relationships to family, desire, religion, the land, politics, trauma and the natural world — and how these things shape who we are.
Salazar is a writer, editor and community organizer from New Brunswick. They edit the publications The Fiddlehead and Plenitude.
Books by Selina Boan, Roxanna Bennett, Leah Horlick and Andrea Thompson also picked up a couple nominations.
Boan's debut book Undoing Hours explores the connection between language and power, as the poet reflects on her upbringing as a white settler and urban nehiyaw woman. A finalist for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize, Boan was also included in Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2020.
Bennett, a writer from Whitby, Ont., examines pain and the limitations of language in her poetry, which draws from her experiences as a queer poet who lives with a disability. The Untranslatable I is her third book. She previously won the 2020 Raymond Souster Award and 2020 Trillium Book Award for poetry for the book Unmeaningable.
Horlick's Moldovan Hotel was created after a 2017 trip to eastern Europe, where the poet visited the area her Jewish ancestors fled. The Calgary poet's previous books include For Your Own Good and Riot Lung.
Thompson, a celebrated spoken word poet, investigates the interaction between page and stage, public and private, while exploring poetry through the lens of Black history in her book A Selected History of Soul Speak. Thompson previously released the albums One and Soulorations, and authored a novel called Over Our Heads.
Here are all the books on the 2022 longlists.
2022 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award longlist for best debut book:
- Undoing Hours by Selina Boan
- Antonyms for Daughter by Jenny Boychuk
- Dream of No One but Myself by David Bradford
- Creeland by Dallas Hunt
- Qorbanot: Offerings by Alisha Kaplan
- I will be more myself in the next world by Matsuki Masutani
- Me, You, Then Snow by Khashayar Mohammadi
- The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba
- Mouthfuls of Space by Tom Prime
- Little Housewolf by Medrie Purdham
- sulphurtongue by Rebecca Salazar
- Intruder by Bardia Sinaee
- Autowar by Assiyah Jamilla Touré
2022 Pat Lowther Memorial Award longlist for books by Canadian women:
- The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett
- Field Requiem by Sheri Benning
- Undoing Hours by Selina Boan
- Dear Birch, by Margaret Christakos
- Solstice 2020 by Sue Goyette
- awâsis – kinky and dishevelled by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer
- Moldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick
- Il Virus by Lillian Nećakov
- A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen
- Oracule by Nicole Raziya Fong
- sulphurtongue by Rebecca Salazar
- A Selected History of Soul Speak by Andrea Thompson
2022 Raymond Souster Award longlist for best book by a member of the League of Canadian Poets:
- The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett
- The Lost Time Accidents by Síle Englert
- with/holding: Poems by Chantal Gibson
- awâsis – kinky and dishevelled by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer
- Moldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick
- Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli by D.A. Lockhart
- The Bad Wife by Micheline Maylor
- Blue Suitcase by Jim Nason
- The Junta of Happenstance by Tolu Oloruntoba
- Broken Dawn Blessings by Adam Sol
- A Selected History of Soul Speak by Andrea Thompson
- Resurrection Fail by John Wall Barger
This year's League of Canadian Poets award shortlists will be announced on April 21, 2022. Winners will be announced on May 5.
