Page 13 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Finalist
Jody Chan
sick
Black Lawrence Press
Jody Chan writes, “have you ever found your specific wounds curled up in a song / written by someone else?” sick is medicine and music. This book unearths a tenderness unknown to me before reading these poems and witnessing their “humble magic.” Chan’s lyric is a landscape I return to find myself. How lucky are we to be living and reading while Jody Chan is writing and teaching us how to be “warm & unafraid” — what a tremendous, marvelous gift. —Yujane Chen
This striking debut—poems of history, of beauty, of violence, of grief—will surprise you at every turn of phrase and page. Chan’s work is innovative, their treatment of the universal human condition meticulously unique. Do not miss this collection. —Erica Dawson
In sick, Jody Chan examines loss through brilliant and stunning lyric, each poem urgent with gentle ferocity. So much exists here in the absence of what is said, so much feels vestigial – a phantom limb that keeps aching through deftly crafted nuance, simply mesmerizing. The many exigencies of grief appear and reappear in this collection like a “hungry ghost”, but Chan proclaims/reclaims, “this is a love story this is a love story this is a love story.” —Jay Ward
Jody Chan is a writer, organizer, Taiko drummer, and therapist-in-training based in Toronto. They are the poetry editor for Hematopoeisis, a 2017 VONA alum, a member of the Winter Tangerine Workshops Team, and the 2018 winner of the Third Coast Poetry Contest. Their first chapbook is published with Damaged Goods Press. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is published in BOAAT, Looseleaf Magazine, Nat. Brut, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere. They can be found online at www. jodychan.com and offline in bookstores or dog parks.
Jury Comment: Reading Jody Chan’s sick feels like discovering a love letter tattooed on the other side of one’s heart. They write: “yes you can have my head if / you’ll take what’s inside it” and we are compelled to embrace this lyric voice as one would welcome a friend, as a “soil remember[s] /
a skull”. Here we are all proximal to grave dirt and Sephora, cityscapes and
Teresa Teng, dandelions and violation, “girl/bird/boy”. This is a verse on the pulse of our current moment of radiant kindships and collective symptoms, all rendered with a queer and tender, irrepressible hope.
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