2025 Mid-Year Award News Roundup

Over halfway through 2025, and we’ve already collected quite a few nominations and awards. Here is a roundup of our award news (with some jury citations)!

Trillium Book Award

DADDY by Jake Byrne, winner

“Emotionally affecting, smart, and propulsive, Jake Byrne’s Daddy uses poetry as an act of intimate world building. By synthesizing different modes of writing – dialogic constructions, theatrical forms of address, an essayistic expository voicing, Byrne creates a contemporary mode of writing – one that does that evasive thing: it accommodates the full dimensions of a life.” — from the jurors of the 2025 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

DADDY by Jake Byrne

If you reloop trauma enough, does it make a danceable rhythm? If you get lost in physical sensation enough, does that make you free?

Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Dayo by Marc Perez, winner

“Dayo is a collection that documents each moment as it passes. It is lush and animate in describing the mundane, gentle in its nostalgia and reflections of home, and sharp in its commentary on enclosures and borders. Each word is a seed of complex sensory images that sprout through the page to find connections across the book. These poems are elegant in the way they consider how fleeting each moment really is, while being deeply rooted in the possibilities of a good life. It is a nourishing and sturdy achievement.” —from the jurors of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Pat Lowther Memorial Award

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala, shortlisted

“Manahil Bandukwala’s Heliotropia undoes the estrangement of today’s chaotic everyday, quietly drawing the reader close, noticing, coaxing warmth and light from sharp angles and buried places. Moving gently, generously between the pulsing, visceral intimacies of personal and historic separation and splitting, wonderous, perplexing carnalities of an unfolding soul story, and galaxies that glory on beyond the digital chirp of our own atmospheric preoccupation, Bandukwala resolutely returns to the redemptive promise of joy, magic, love, ‘even after everything crumbled / and crumbled again.’” — from the jurors of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala

“Where fear collides with the little shield of love.”

impact statement by Jody Chan, longlisted

impact statement by Jody Chan

A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.

Raymond Souster Award

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala, shortlisted

“It’s an understatement to say it is difficult to write a good love poem and yet Bandukwala has given us a whole, shining book of them. Heliotropia is full-fledged, lyric blooming. This is poetry that is somehow both gentle and biting, reminding us of the continuous effort it takes to love amidst a multitude of griefs in the world. This exploration is a force, pulling the reader toward a future where, ‘something survived here, something that could be us.’” — from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award

Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala

Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval.

echolalia echolalia by Jane Shi, shortlisted

“echolalia echolalia is a collection of poems that constantly twists and strives toward a shifting light. It tends to structure in a way that is at times particular and reassuring, and at other times a fascinating and feral reordering of voice and vision. Shi writes like a pretty splinter in your soft flesh: her poems are sharp, urging your attention, lingering as a sweet ache that your body remembers even when the sliver is gone.” — from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award

echolalia echolalia by Jane Shi

Relentlessly inventive poetry that proclaims a diasporic, queer, and disabled self-hood.