Poem of the Week ( View Archives )
July 12, 2021

Joliette

Yusuf Saadi

Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, “Joliette,” is from Canadian finalist Yusuf Saadi’s shortlisted collection Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions).

Poem of the Week ( View Archives )
July 5, 2021

The Sturgeon’s Lover

Joseph Dandurand

Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, The Sturgeon’s Lover, is from Canadian finalist Joseph Dandurand’s shortlisted collection The East Side of It All (Nightwood Editions). Inspired by his fishing experience on the Fraser River, Dandurand writes of a sturgeon who feeds on the dead and falls in love with a man.

Poem of the Week ( View Archives )
June 28, 2021

Oxygen (from Obit)

Victoria Chang

This week’s poem is from Victoria Chang’s shortlisted collection Obit. “In this book ‘grief takes many / forms, as tears or pinwheels...’, ‘dying lasts forever / until it stops’ and ‘our sadness is plural, but grief is / singular,’” the judges say. Listen to Victoria Chang read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here.

Poem of the Week ( View Archives )
June 21, 2021

Grief After Grief After Grief After Grief

Billy-Ray Belcourt

For National Indigenous Peoples Day, our Poem of the Week is “Grief After Grief After Grief After Grief,” by the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian winner, Billy-Ray Belcourt from his collection, This Wound is a World (Frontenac House).