Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, and teacher published and anthologised internationally, including translations of her work into Italian and Spanish. Lubrin’s debut poetry collection, Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her work has been nominated for, among others, the Toronto Book Award, Journey Prize, and bpNichol Chapbook Award. 2019 Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, Lubrin holds an MFA from the University of Guelph.
Judges’ Citation
The Dyzgraphxst is Canisia Lubrin’s spectacular feat of architecture called a poem.
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.’
Selected poems
by Canisia Lubrin
I pull off I’s toes and leaves them near the sea, I’s sea,
back to the sea as before, yet an hour’s drift from
Manzanilla, which is no place but a word I loves,
I knows what begins the act of saying things, what is lodged there
a promise of some life, not unlike this coal-grey sky, not unlike
the not-good marching band a street away throwing madness
out with I’s lonely discography, I says “please,” without toes
but what about these feet now that they are not ceased
in their act of making things, disappeared things
things given over to the gesture, the method, to the field
awash and undertow, what is love but the hand returning
to claim the dust red, white, black as a coal-swept evening
Copyright © 2019
from The Dyzgraphxst
I am held within these claims: that I have kissed unlucky
things, buried pets, eaten sugar-free ice cream, endured a first
blood test, made friends without benefits, and lost them
found new ways of saying what is not ever enough to say
ways to fish, to drink, to park, to burn, to burn into
something new, with this life I have been careful
too much, disciplined to the extent of (dis)remembrance
infrequent colours pissed into the wind, I don’t remember
when I decided to fold into my self, or when walking
foot before foot to the feeding ground of murderous birds
became the way to admit that words can be a giving up
outcome of years rearranging a subterranean scar
***
and I have been called many things late at night
greener grass, scientific utopia, dream of ancestors
what about rainy weekends, what about poltroons,
the doomed cults full of hyper-rational people
who’ve miscalculated the heights of doors, how many
stairs are left, and when stood up from a tumble
find polite applause, find the romance of liberal
consumption on the news, anyway, any sharp
thing is a short distance from possible to voluble
father, what about a foot laid down hard on the gloss
of the business-suited, the testing birds that remind
me I am just as committed to expression as to freedom
Copyright © 2020, Canisia Lubrin