We're excited to announce the winner of our 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize is Jaeyun Yoo for her poem "have you seen my father"! Jaeyun Yoo will receive $2000 in prize money and her poem will appear in the Spring 2023 issue of The Fiddlehead. You can read the poem or listen to a reading of it by Jaeyun Yoo now on our website.
Editorial Assistant Jamie Kitt's Interview with Jaeyun Yoo whose poem "have you seen my father" won our 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and was published in Issue 298 (Winter 2024)
Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet, psychiatrist, and graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in Room, Canthius, CV2, and elsewhere. She published a collaborative chapbook, Brine, with Harbour Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets.
Editorial Assistant Rosie Leggott's Interview with Blair Trewartha whose poems "Sifto" and "Equal Temperament" were published in Issue 298 (Winter 2024)
Blair Trewartha’s first collection of poetry, Easy Fix (Palimpsest, 2014) was shortlisted for the Relit Award. He is the author of three chapbooks: Break In (Cactus Press, 2010), Porcupine Burning (Baseline Press, 2012), and human energy (Anstruther Press, 2022). His poetry has appeared in several journals.
Nestle In Words Like An Animal: The Poetic G/Rasp of Tongue, Throat, and Mouth in G by Kirby
G, Klara du Plessis & Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi. Palimpsest Press, 2023.
First, let’s talk about the design/packaging of this book.
It’s exquisite. The colour palette, fonts, printed endpapers, on signature Coach House zephyr, readable text on the page. A book you want to pick up, hold, caress with the eyes and the touch. Congrats to in-house designer Ellie Hastings, editor Jim Johnstone, and publisher Aimee Parent Dunn. Finery.
Lyrical Authenticity by Klara du Plessis
The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone. Coach House Books, 2023.
Cautious Praise by Lynn Davies
Lent, Kate Cayley, Book*hug Press, 2023.
In Lent, Kate Cayley’s voice is driven by doubt and occasional bouts of confidence. In “Falling,” she says matter-of-factly,
I can’t find time to repair.
“Junkyard Apocalypse”: Uneasy Ecopoems, Unhomely Homes by David Huebert
Kill Your Starlings, Tom Cull. Gaspereau Press, 2023.
With the abundance of high caliber poetry books published each year in Canada, it’s extremely difficult to narrow down which specific poetry collections to recommend. The only criteria I can think of on which to base that recommendation is that feeling you get when you finish reading it. More than appreciation or admiration, it’s a deep sense of relief that you get and a genuine thankfulness that this book exists, and you were lucky enough to find it.
Ian Stephens’s lone book-length publication, Diary of a Trademark, feels like something of a lost classic, a rough (in all senses of the word) snapshot of early-nineties Montreal through the eyes of a gay man who died soon after the book was published. In Diary, Stephens knows he is succumbing to HIV/AIDS and, in the essay that opens the collection, “Weary State of Grace,” discusses a recent hospital stay in visceral detail.
I am a bit of a trash bird and love collecting odd things—a little taxidermied turtle I’ve named Tertullian, century-old birthday books filled with the soft cursive of strangers, quack medicine almanacs, a yellowed trade card where a burning Joan of Arc sells bouillon. One of my favorite things is a Morrell Pride calendar from 1938.
