Poetry in Transit 2022 – Meet the Featured Poets!

The poet: Selina Boan is a white settler–nehiyaw poet living on the traditional, unceded territories of xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ílwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) peoples. She has received several honours for her work, including Room’s 2018 Emerging Writer Award and the 2017 National Magazine Award for Poetry. She is currently a poetry editor for Rahila’s Ghost Press and a member of the Growing Room Collective. Undoing Hours is her debut poetry collection.

The poetry: Undoing Hours (Nightwood Editions) considers the various ways we undo, inherit, reclaim and (re)learn. Boan’s poems tell stories of meeting family, of experiencing love and heartbreak, and of learning new ways to express and understand the world around her through nêhiyawêwin.

The poet: Joseph Dandurand is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation, located on the Fraser River about twenty minutes east of Vancouver, BC. He resides there with his three children. Dandurand is the director of the Kwantlen Cultural Centre and the author of several books of poetry including The East Side of It All, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2021, Dandurand received the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

The poetry: The East Side of It All (Nightwood Editions) is written from the perspective of a drug user and single-room occupant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and explores the ongoing process of healing through reconnection with family, the natural world and traditional Indigenous (Kwantlen) storytelling.

The poet: Henry Doyle lives and works in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A long-time member of the DTES Writing Collective, Henry has published work in multiple literary magazines and the anthologies V6A and From the Heart of it All. He has won Geist’s DTES Jamboree Writing Contest and Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize.

The poetry: No Shelter (Anvil Press) takes readers on a hard-scrabble journey, starting from Doyle’s early years as a runaway from foster homes, an incarcerated youth, a boxer, and a homeless wage-earner living in shelters and on the streets of Ottawa and Toronto, to his eventual arrival in Vancouver to work in the construction labour pools before landing work as a custodian and maintenance man.

The poet: Leanne Dunic transgresses genres and form to produce projects such as To Love the Coming End (Book*hug / Chin Music Press 2017) and The Gift (Book*hug 2019). Her most recent multidisciplinary project is One and Half of You, a book that is accompanied by three songs written and performed by the band tidepools.

The poetry: One and Half of You (Talonbooks) is a lyric memoir from a talented multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. In sinuous language, with candour, openness, and surprising humour, Dunic explores sibling and romantic love and the complexities of being a biracial person looking for completion in another.

The poet: Gary Geddes has written and edited more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation and anthologies, including 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize.

The poetry: The Oysters I Bring to Banquets (Guernica Editions) ranges from whimsical poems about the building of a greenhouse to the struggle of characters in classical legends to cope with the interference of close relatives and extended family, the gods.

The poet: Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer, editor, and artist. Her work can be found in EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Carte Blanche, Briarpatch Magazine and elsewhere. New Infinity is her first book.

The poetry: New Infinity (Metatron Press) is an experimental novella that follows a woman as she lives and dreams her way through the philosophical implications of autoimmune disease. Met by a labyrinth of closing doors, she searches for meaning and connection among fragmented realities and failed relationships, finding infinitude in the healing process of bibliomancy.

The poet: Born in 100 Mile House, BC, Shaun Robinson has lived in Vancouver since 2006. Robinson’s poetry has received Honourable Mention in ARC Magazine’s 2018 Poem of the Year contest. He studied in UBC’s Creative Writing MFA program, where he served as the poetry editor of PRISM international. He is also the author of the chapbook Manmade Clouds and currently works as an editor for the chapbook press Rahila’s Ghost.

The poetry: If You Discover a Fire (Brick Books) is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer.

The poet: Ellie Sawatzky is a writer from Kenora, Ontario. She was a finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and the recipient of CV2’s 2018 Young Buck Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. None of This Belongs to Me is her debut poetry collection.

The poetry: None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions) rustles the underbrush of identity, seeking clarity on the nature of ownership and belonging. None of This Belongs to Me plots a young woman’s coming of age in a time of environmental and socio-economic peril.

The poet: Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook On Forgetting a Language and Pebble Swing, her debut full-length poetry collection. She has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and Minola Review’s Poetry Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. She studies English and world literature at Simon Fraser University and is an editor at Room magazine. 

The poetry: Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions) earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface.

The poet: Terence Young recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Claremont Review, an international literary journal for young writers. His first collection of poetry, The Island in Winter, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published several books: Rhymes With Useless, After Goodlake’s, and Moving Day. 

The poetry: In Smithereens (Harbour Publishing), Terence Young ranges widely among forms, subjects, tones and moods, invoking the domestic world of family and home, as well as the associated realms of work and play.