Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up in a cabin down a dirt road without electricity or running water. She studied applied mathematics and physics at university, and went to her scholarship interview wearing shoes she had found at the dump. Her summer student projects in space physics involved numerical modeling of the northern lights. Her poetry appears in magazines such as The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Nat. Brut, OxMag, Strange Horizons, and Vallum, among others. Northerny is her first book.
Photo credit: Sean Pond
Judges’ Citation
Dawn Macdonald’s Northerny is a blast of crisp Yukon air. Funny and fresh, unexpected and daring, it understands ‘the personal is heretical,’ and glories in that fact.
Dawn Macdonald’s Northerny is a blast of crisp Yukon air. Funny and fresh, unexpected and daring, it understands ‘the personal is heretical,’ and glories in that fact. It’s a rush, a relief, and remakes with impishness the notion of what a poem can be.
Selected poems
by Dawn Macdonald
I’m not so interested in writing
any Northern/Nature/Yukoner poems about the Northern Lights and
my trusty-sled-dog-see-your-breath-adventure but all my poems turn
out to have animals in them because that’s where I’m
and I do share 50% of my DNA with a banana
so I don’t want to hear any more about how I’m
bad at sharing just because I’m an only child
and everybody’s bad at assumptions
well at the end of the day I was born
here at the end of the day in a thunder
storm of anesthesia and incubation
an animal purred into that room, nipped
a neat umbilical, wolfed
my head right out of the womb. that’s its breath
on the window page
blurring
it makes a real hot meat view
Copyright © 2024 by Dawn Macdonald, Northerny, University of Alberta Press
A Boring Poem
- An Interview with Dawn Macdonald Pinhole Poetry
- The Next Chapter with Dawn Macdonald CBC
- Poems by Dawn Macdonald The /tƐmz/ Review
- Rob McLennan interviews Dawn Macdonald
- Dawn Macdonald reads at Literary Editions University of Alberta Press
- DMQ Virtual Salon Reading with Dawn Macdonald
- Dawn Macdonald wins 2025 Canadian First Book Prize University of Alberta Press
- Northerny: Growig Up in Canada’s North University of Alberta Press