Liz Howard’s debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was named a Globe and Mail top 100 book. A National Magazine Award finalist, her recent work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Literary Review of Canada, Room Magazine and Best Canadian Poetry 2021. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was published by McClelland & Stewart in June 2021. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at McGill University, University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and The Capilano Review. She is also an adjunct professor and lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and serves on the editorial board for Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.
- 2022
- 2016
Judges’ Citation
Responding to astrophysical evidence of a potential collision between the known universe and a parallel universe, the poems in Liz Howard’s powerful collection trace this ‘cosmic bruise’ as it recurs like an epigenetic expression in family history…
Responding to astrophysical evidence of a potential collision between the known universe and a parallel universe, the poems in Liz Howard’s powerful collection trace this ‘cosmic bruise’ as it recurs like an epigenetic expression in family history, intergenerational trauma, and the phenomena of everyday life. Like dark matter in the bloodstream, or the star-shaped cells in the brain and spinal cord, the poet carries this vestige within her, observing its shape as a present absence in the spilled ashes of her Indigenous father, or in dissociative childhood experiences of abjection, or in meditations on cognition and Indigenous cosmology. The poems in LETTERS IN A BRUISED COSMOS are intimate, astonishing, and moving caresses of the bruise the past makes within and around us, marking the many ways in which ‘history is a sewing motion / along a thin membrane’.
Judges’ Citation
With penetrating intelligence and playful musicality, Liz Howard’s ambitious debut collection keeps us delightfully off-balance with its mix of lyricism and experiment, allusion and invention
With penetrating intelligence and playful musicality, Liz Howard’s ambitious debut collection keeps us delightfully off-balance with its mix of lyricism and experiment, allusion and invention. In her efforts ‘to dream a science that would name me,’ Howard explores a dizzying array of texts and landscapes, from Dante to Erin Mouré, from logging camps to high school dances. But for a poet so attuned to the self as ‘a fictive province,’ we are all ‘infinite citizens,’ constructed of dredged materials and fraught histories. Howard is capable of thrilling leaps of language, repurposing Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha or imagining an oddly tender childhood memory of a ‘boreal swing’ made from the carcass of a moose. These poems are filled with energy and magic, suspended between competing inheritances, at home in their hyper-modern hybridity. INFINITE CITIZEN OF THE SHAKING TENT confronts its legacies with vivid imagery and crackling language, and introduces us to a bold, original poetic voice.
Selected poems
by Liz Howard
Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss
to explain this place you’ve returned to from above;
cedar along a broken shore, twisting in a wake of fog.
I’ve lived in rooms with others, of no place and no mind
trying to bind a self inside the contagion of words while
your eyes open the night’s slow static. At a loss
to understand all that I cannot say, as if you came
upon the infinite simply by thinking and it was
a shore of broken cedar twisting in a wake of fog.
If I moan from an animal throat it is in hope you
will return to me what I lost learning to speak.
Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss
to ever know the true terminus of doubt, the limits of skin.
As long as you hold me I am doubled from without and within:
a wake of fog unbroken, a shore of twisted cedar.
I will press myself into potential, into your breath,
and maybe what was lost will return in sleep once I see
your eyes open into the night’s slow static, at a loss.
Broken on a shore of cedar. We twist in a wake of fog.
Copyright © 2016
A Wake
My mother hunted moose
as a child my grandfather taught her
how to field dress a bull:
make an incision from the throat
to the pelvis
the abdominal cavity emptied
haul him up between two pines
the body inverted
antlers almost grazing
the soil
each hind limb leashed to a trunk above
to allow the flesh to cool
then she’d climb inside
the open chest
fix her toes along the ledge
of two ribs
and with a kick to the bull’s left shoulder
he sent her
swinging
Copyright © 2015 by Liz Howard
Boreal Swing
I just want to go back
into the bush and eat
more blueberries
growing wild as she
drops me off at the lumber
mill I’m fifteen and a janitor
cleaning out the urinals
at the debarker I find
pubic hair the lumberjacks
have left long barbs curled
to “put me in my place”
debarker: where they
keep the machine that
cuts the bark away from
the trees years ago my
blood cousin fell in
and emerged skinless
that was before this brain
sprouted from my spine
in an allegory trees
would be distributed
evenly throughout the
narrative in a gesture
of looking back over
my shoulder as mom
pulls away from the
yard I have on a hard
hat that is orange and too
big over my weird bleached
hair I have only the same
rag for the toilets as the
dishes when I look up the
sky is obscured by smoke
I can never tell what
they’re burning
Copyright © 2015 by Liz Howard
Debarker
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hospitality: the first demand
what is your name?
the city bound me so I entered
to dream a science that would name me
daughter and launch beyond
grief, that old thoracic cause
myocardium: a blood-orange foundry
handed down by the humoral
anatomists and not be
inside my own head perpetually
not simply a Wittgenstein’s girl
but an infinite citizen in a shaking tent
If you are in need of an answer
consult a jiisakiiwinini
scientific rigour
psychoanalysis
the unconscious a construct
method amphibious
of two minds
that’s the translator
her task to receive
the call that comes
down the barrel
of the future
all of us a congress
of selves a vibrational chorus
I know myself to be a guest
in your mind a grand lodge
of everything I long to know and hold
within this potlatch we call
the present
moment
If I speak of the night
speak its illicit cerebrum
of branches and back seats
speak beyond our future
a thinkable urn
my empirical training
my non-status brow ridge
indivisible and glistening
every time I tease a thread of being
from its moment in standard time
let’s elevate the coordinates of distress
take it all in
I’m all in and over the limit
the limit, the eliminative, the lumens, the mens rea, the loom
to be a shopkeep in the showroom of nouns
what to purchase and what
to disavow
speak with saffron
speak of just the small bits, atomic
speak of the inevitable curve in the data
all foreclosed upon and glimmering
like a good bitch in the brine of night
I haven’t nearly enough heat here
in this stakeout
the sky died and I’m its anima in the pitch thickets
I have fingers with which to squish
pin cherries and rosehips
dogwood, I have begun
to hear a rosary of pure tones, the colony
hear its call toward disorder
citizens, I have never
been dishonest in my horror
the underclass of our era
a requisite paternity test
dominus
in excelsis
From Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent by Liz Howard
Copyright © 2015 by Liz Howard
Thinktent
The sky was never my court date.
If I died once. If I left the body.
Habeas corpus.
This is not my grave.
The value in a dead woman
is that she cannot be killed
again or cross-examined.
The value in being the dead
woman at trial is the Crown
doesn’t represent you
regardless.
The value in being
dead is that it’s impolite
to speak ill
of you.
What is called
wellness,
victim-witness?
A swab taken
of every orifice.
Were there any
identifying marks?
Were you in fact
on the moon
that night,
Miss Howard?
Did you make a choice?
I made a cut—it released something.
I broke the line.
Copyright © 2021, Liz Howard