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At metro Joliette with my jolicoeur,
we walked to the depanneur,
discussed dasein while buying
a Perrier and a block of beurre.
Outside, minus twenty-three,
with windchill it’s real fuckery,
your back pockets warm my fingertips,
your cherry ChapStick so summery.
Take me to the everglades,
a place where flowers never fade,
but pans inside your basement wait
to fry us scrambled eggs, real buttery.

Blue sunrise on my palms, a peignoir,
a neighbour grows peonies in a baignoire,
I dreamt a homeless peintre
revealed Hochelag in a Renoir
Make love inside these old maisons
until condos sail across the St-Laurent,
The vieux-accent is extinct,
And the cordonier’s window plein noir.
Morning flurries, très légère,
someone’s shovel scrapes fragile air,
a chasse-neige is herding cloud,
The hunched man salts his spiral stairs.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, “Joliette,” is from Canadian finalist Yusuf Saadi’s shortlisted collection Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions).  

“Where other poets find moon, Saadi sees ‘moon's kneecap,’ where others see mere daffodils, Saadi asks: ‘Do daffodils dissolve in your / unpractised inner eye?’ This is the poet who is unafraid of play: ‘Outside of Kantian space and time, do you miss dancing / in dusty basements where sex was once phenomenal?’ This, too, is the poet unafraid of the daily grind, of ‘writing poetry at night / with the rust of our lives’. Pluviophile is a beautiful, refreshing debut,” the judges say. 

Listen to Yusuf Saadi read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here.

In the deepest part of the river
there lived a great sturgeon
and she swam along the bottom
and fed upon the dead who had fallen.
She was about three hundred years old
and when she was full, she came to
the surface and jumped as high as
she could and all the males came
to her and she kissed each male
and let them have her. Months later
she quietly went to her favourite part
of the river and there she released
her eggs in the millions and then began
again to swim the bottom and to search
for any new bodies that had fallen
from upriver, which she feasted upon
with her old softly kissed lips.

The legend goes that a fisherman
had fallen into the waters and was drowning
when the great sturgeon came to him
and asked him for a kiss. He agreed
and the two fell in love and together
they would feed upon all the food
at the bottom of the river. One day
her eggs came to life and created
the people across the water.
The people lived there for centuries
and the sturgeon and man would visit
from time to time, bringing them food
to survive the cold wet winters
until the people too walked into
the water and fell to the bottom
as the man kissed his lover.

Today we do not fish for sturgeon
as their numbers have been decimated
by overfishing and loss of spawning
grounds. Whenever I catch a sturgeon
in my net I let her go and she always
turns back and smiles as she flicks
her mighty tail and splashes me.
My son always laughs as I stand there
stunned and wet, while the great sturgeon
slowly swims away and turns back
to blow us a kiss. We both wipe
our lips as the great sturgeon
falls to the bottom of the water.
There, waiting for her, is her lover.
He kisses her one last time.
She cries as she begins to eat him.

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. This week’s poem, The Sturgeon’s Lover, is from Canadian finalist Joseph Dandurand’s shortlisted collection The East Side of It All (Nightwood Editions). Inspired by his fishing experience on the Fraser River, Dandurand writes of a sturgeon who feeds on the dead and falls in love with a man. Dating back to more than 100 million years, sturgeons are now on the edge of extinction. Through his "tragic, wonderful gift of storytelling," Dandurand's poem pays homage to this great fish, who reclaims her river. Watch this conversation  between Joseph Dandurand and our Trustee Ian Williams and to hear more about the poet's process and connection to Kwantlen oral stories.

“Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation, located on the Fraser river near Vancouver. His origin and roots are the sources of wisdom and myths, which he masterly embeds in a drama of a dysfunctional modern society. His crystalline clear and remarkably multilayered poems are written in an unforgettable voice of someone who is telling a story in order to survive and to go on. A story of a man who has become a sasquatch, through writing” the judges say. 

Listen to Joseph Dandurand read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here 

Oxygen—died on March 12, 2012. At
first, it came in heavy green canisters.
Then a large rolling machine that
pushed air day and night. When my
mother changed her clothes, she
had to take the tube out of her nose.
She stopped to catch her breath, as
if breath were constantly in motion,
as if it could be chased. I’m not sure
when I began to notice her panic
without the oxygen, in the way we don’t
notice a leaf turning red or an empire
falling. One day, it just appears, as if
it had been there all along. Like the
hospice staff with their papers, bags
of medicine, their garlands of silence.
Like grief, the way it dangles from
everything like earrings. The way grief
needs oxygen. The way every once in
a while, it catches the light and starts
smoking. The way my grief will die with
me. The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers. 

Notes on the Poem
Our Poem of the Week continues to celebrate the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets. The announcement of this year’s winners is an occasion to delve deeper into the work of all our shortlisted poets. In a recent interview on CBC's Q, Canisia Lubrin mentions gratitude for the “conversations” created by the constellation of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted books. When juxtaposed, thematic threads and images begin to surface: the underworld, grief, a celebration or mistrust in the lyrical “I”, and the rhythmic summoning of ancestry, to cite but a few shared concerns among this year’s shortlist. 

This week’s poem is from Victoria Chang’s shortlisted collection Obit.  “In this book ‘grief takes many / forms, as tears or pinwheels...’, ‘dying lasts forever / until it stops’ and ‘our sadness is plural, but grief is / singular,’” the judges say. Listen to Victoria Chang read the poem of the week in a beautifully illustrated excerpt from the Griffin Poetry Prize Winners Announcement Film here.