Today brought the exciting news that poet Stephen Collis had been awarded the 2019 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is "given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry." The jurors' citation, signed by Hoa Nguyen and Margo Wheaton, states:
Through six collections of poems, Stephen Collis has achieved something remarkable: an invigorating body of work that convincingly addresses both the urgency of the present moment and the long echoes of our historical and lyrical past.
In disrupted language simultaneously unsettled and musical, Collis passionately investigates subjects as diverse as the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, John Clare and the English countryside, the increasing disappearance of public space, and, in a hauntingly beautiful sequence, the death of his sister from cancer. The depth and scope of Collis' vision is startling and impressive; so are the courage, precision, and care he brings to the poems he creates.
In Collis, we find a poet ferociously hitting his stride. We're looking forward with eagerness to what comes next.
We congratulate Collis for this astounding honor and happily direct our listeners to his PennSound author page where they can sample his award-winning work. There you'll find a modest yet broad array of recordings made between 2005 and 2014, including readings, panel discussions, and an interview on Leonard Schwartz's radio program Cross-Cultural Poetics. Among many great resources, I'd especially like to highlight Collis' contributions to North of Invention, the two-day festival we hosted at the Kelly Writers House in January 2011, along with Short Range Poetic Device, a four-part radio show organized and hosted by Collis and Roger Farr during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. As the program notes explain, "Each show hosted a number of Vancouver poets, nearly all of whom were involved in anti-Olympic activities of one sort or another. The poets read from their work and discussed the role of poetry in contemporary struggles, the politics of poetic form, protest genres and both political and literary 'tactics.'" Click here to start listening.
