Page 15 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Finalist
Canisia Lubrin
The Dyzgraphxst
McClelland & Stewart
The Dyzgraphxst presents seven inquiries into selfhood through the perennial figure Jejune. Polyvocal in register, the book moves to mine meanings of kinship through the wide and intimate reach of language across geographies and generations. Against the contemporary backdrop of intensified capitalist fascism, toxic nationalism, and climate disaster, the figure Jejune asks, how have I come to make home out of unrecognizability. Marked by and through diasporic life, Jejune declares, I was not myself. I am not myself. My self resembles something having nothing to do with me.
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work is published widely and has been frequently anthologized, including translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lubrin’s most recent poetry collection, The Dyzgraphxst, was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, named
a finalist for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her debut poetry collection, Voodoo Hypothesis, was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. She was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award for her fiction contribution to The Unpublished City: Vol. 1 and twice longlisted for the Journey Prize. In 2019, she was Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, and was named a Writers’ Trust 2020 Rising Star. In 2021, Lubrin was a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction debut, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.
Jury Comment: The Dyzgraphxst is an astonishing polyvocal performance about Black selfhood and history that all but remakes the language in its own image. Addressed to the poem’s protagonist, Jejune, the seven sections of this powerful work drill deep into difficult territory — colonialism, racism, and the shifting meaning of the first person in a culture where the “I” is usually white. The Dyzgraphxst also has brilliant formal properties that enlarge the reader’s understanding of what poetry can do on the page. Challenging, joyful, and utterly new, Lubrin’s second collection marks her as one of her generation’s most important voices.
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Photo Credit: Anna Keenan