2024
The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize inaugural $5,000 prize was awarded in 2004 – created to acknowledge and celebrate an extraordinarily accomplished writing community and the readers who support them.
Ali Blythe | Goose Lane Editions
From the jury: Breaking the fourteen lines of Keats’s sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” into a sequence of twenty-eight titles, Ali Blythe fashions a sequence of poems that not only tip their hat to their inspiration, but turn lyrically on their own light feet. Each quiet poem, emerging stepwise as a set of short pairs of lines, moves to its own understated choreography of felt thought while also joining itself to the increasingly intricate dance of musing feeling in the book as a whole. A carefully tended celebration of queer love and of hope for an anticipated new day, it is a book to be savoured. Every single word in this slight volume is heavy with love for its subject, for language, and for poetry itself.
Arleen Paré | Caitlin Press
From the jury: Arleen Paré’s Absence of Wings could be called an elegy, a poem of love and mourning for her niece, A., a Brazilian orphan adopted in 1985 by Paré’s sister. But this collection is even more. Part documentary, interrogating official records, making space for A’s “note of distress” and her adopted family’s grief, it is also “mythopoeic wherever needed places I couldn’t places/I could only imagine.” As well, it is “not a singular but a collective story,” linking A. with stolen First Nations children, exploited Duplessis orphans, gay men dying of AIDS. It is the snow storm of A.’s life—with others’—told in Paré’s incandescent poetry.
Kathryn Mockler | Book*Hug Press
From the jury: Anecdotes, by Kathryn Mockler, is a darkly humorous, playful, and inventive book that—through short fiction, one-act screenplays, prose poetry, and found poems—reveals humanity at its most deplorable with a straightforward nonchalance that makes its words resonate all the more deeply. Through her vulnerable, honest, and unsentimental characters, Mockler holds a mirror to a world damaged by misogyny and capitalist apathy, while still maintaining hope and compassion for humans and the planet we live on.
shō yamagushiku | Penguin Random House Canada
From the jury: The speaker of these poems, of Okinawan heritage, longs to break from the world of his past, even though he is “a continent away.” As in memory and dream, glimpses of his life merge with the lives of ancestors: mushroom cloud, the pounding of cane, grandmother’s white wings. The experience of reading shima is fluid, the boundaries of form and line dissolving. Poems in squat squares suggest the concrete structures of American military occupation. Some poems take the shape of seashell spirals, perhaps the pathways of fisherwomen. And at times, in the breaking waves of this extraordinary collection, there is “a slivering chance/ to be reborn.”
Tim Lilburn | University of Alberta Press
From the jury: Luminous meditations, reflective hesitations, subtle provocations—these are some of the bountiful offerings readers will find in Tim Lilburn’s Numinous Seditions. Poets, sages, and scientists variously accompany the author as he goes his own thought-full way, quietly rebellious, athwart the forceful torrent unleashed by global capitalism and rootless settler colonialism. Those who share his conviction that cultivating a contemplative interior life will provide them with essential resources to face the growing climate crisis and its randomly devastating effects will be richly rewarded by Lilburn’s collection of essays, talks, and reviews, but even those who do not share it will find much to mull over in the shimmering insights and lucid arguments of his “muse-goaded, agent-intellect-propelled” prose.
©2024 Victoria Book Prizes. All rights reserved
