Grad Canisia Lubrin a finalist for Griffin Poetry Prize, among other awards

It’s been an eventful spring season for alumna Canisia Lubrin. In addition to her recent receipt of a 2021 Wyndham Campbell Prize, Canisia is one of the three Canadian finalists for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize for her sophomore collection The Dyzgraphxst.

Awarded annually to one international and one Canadian collection, the Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the world’s most generous awards in the genre, with each winner receiving $65k, and $10k earmarked for each of the finalists. Guelph CW MFA graduates who have previously been finalists for this award include Aisha Sasha John, Soraya Peerbaye and Liz Howard (winner, 2016).

The international judges for this year’s Griffin Prize are Ilya Kaminsky, Aleš Šteger and Souvankham Thammavongsa. They had this to say about The Dyzgraphxst:

“The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin’s spectacular feat of architecture called a poem. Built with ‘I’—a single mark on the page, a voice, a blade, ‘a life-force soaring back’—and assembled over seven acts addressing language, grammar, sentence, line, stage, and world, the poet forms, invents, surprises, and sharpens life. Generous, generating, and an abundance of rigour. A wide and widening ocean of feeling are the blueprints of this book. It is shaped to be ‘the shape of the shape / of the shape of a thing that light curves over time / length to width to depth and all of us its information.’”

There has been no shortage of recognition for this remarkable book, which is also shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature—having already won the poetry catagory—and longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Raymond Souster Award.

Don’t miss out! You can order your own copy directly from the publisher, or support your local independent book store.