The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry from the shortlist of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections. Featuring works from shortlisted poets Robyn Creswell, Iman Mersal, Ada Limón, Susan Musgrave, Roger Reeves, and Ocean Vuong.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry in English from the shortlist of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

In The Hundred Lives Russell Thornton illuminates the intricate imaginative orders of love at work within an individual life.

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2020 Music for the Dead and Resurrected captures the complexity of living in the shadows of imperial force, of the vulnerability of bodies, of seeing with more than the eyes. Valzhyna Mort's work is characterised by a memorial sensibility that honours those lost to the violences of nation states. In Music for the Dead and Resurrected the poet offers us a body of work which balances political import with serious play. There are few poets writing with such an intuitive sense of the balance between arcane and contemporary currents in poetry. Mort's lines are timeless, finely honed to last beyond a single lifetime.

Introduces a distinctive voice in Eastern European poetry.

Award-winning Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 - the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America - Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre. After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor's "Find" function to search for the word "injun." The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem. Though it has been phased out of use in our "post-racial" society, the word "injun" is peppered throughout pulp western novels. Injun retraces, defaces, and effaces the use of this word as a colonial and racial marker. While the subject matter of the source text is clearly problematic, the textual explorations in Injun help to destabilize the colonial image of the "Indian" in the source novels, the western genre as a whole, and the Western canon.

Library of Congress copy signed by the author.

The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States “i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.” Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.

What characterizes women as a group is our colonized status. To be colonized is not to think for oneself, to think on behalf of "the other," to put one's emotions to work in service of "the other." In short, not to exist. Nicole Brossard is known internationally for her writings on writing, on feminism, and on lesbian existence. This edition released for a new wave of feminist outrage is a book full of spirit, energy, insight, and chutzpah. She is a major voice in contemporary literature with incisive and hard-hitting essays about feminist imagination and culture. I believe there's only one explanation for all of these texts: my desire and my will to understand patriarchal reality and how it works, not for its own sake but for its tragic consequences in the lives of women, in the life of the spirit. Years of anger, revolt, certitude, and conviction are in The Aerial Letter; years of fighting against the screen which stands in the way of women's energy, identity, and creativity. --Nicole Brossard

Distinguished by its lyricism, depth of emotion, its metaphysical bent and the colour and wide range of reference in its imagery, The Fifth Window, opens up new vistas of language and experience. The landscape and climate of Vancouver and the BC coast imbue this collection with a spiritual and physical immediacy and energy. The area’s trees, mountains, rivers, creeks and rain inform an ecstatic vision in which the psyche and natural world meet and become one.