Awards and Honours

Awards and Honours

• A Road Map for Finding Wild Horses

  [E]xactly what the world needs right now —Shawna Lemay

  • Praise:

    The hidden world so delicately and carefully and respectfully observed by Trisia Eddy Woods is exactly what the world needs right now. She does not shirk from the brutal aspects of what she sees but allows the reader/viewer to hold their gaze because she presents her subject with remarkable tenderness and patience and care. If her work sometimes hurts to look at it is only because it is both exquisitely beautiful and at exactly the same time so aware of loss.

    —Shawna Lemay, Everything Affects Everyone and Calm Things

    This beguiling book calls us to enter a realm of patience and tender observation, and rewards us with moments of magic. As we follow the writer on her year-round treks to observe wild horses, we are led towards the sense that our humanness is no longer separate, and to see that an encounter with a quiet doe or a wild stallion offers us a bridge between worlds. The poems glance at the wilderness impacts of forestry and other human activities, but don’t dwell on the damage. Instead, in lines that are precise, spare and yet vivid, Trisia Eddy Woods offers us a hope rooted in deep attentiveness.

    —Alice Major, Knife on Snow

• Pale Grey Dot
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Nominated: Aurora Awards, Best novel
  • Reviews:

    • One heck of a debut novel. —R. Graeme Cameron, Amazing Stories

  The thrilling sci-fi debut novel from pillar of the Toronto science fiction community, Don Miasek.

  • Praise:
    • Don Miasek plunges readers into a cracking fusion of cyberpunk and space opera, whirling us with breakneck action through a wonderfully realized vision of a inhabited solar system riven by intrigue. As agendas and loyalties fray and collide, our only certainty is that we care deeply about the characters, no matter which side they think they are on. —David Annandale, Warlord (Warhammer 40,000) and The Tyrant Skies (A Marvel: Untold Novel)
    • Brimming with atmosphere from the first paragraph, the incredible world-building by Don Miasek will draw you in, but it's the fascinating characters and intriguing plot that will keep you there. Pale Grey Dot is a gripping debut that won't let you go until the last page is turned. —Jason Pchajek, author of Bounty
• Black Umbrella
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Shortlisted: High Plains Book Award, Woman Writer

  A tough and tender collection that contributes to one of the most compelling narratives of the modern age - the contemporary family in

  ...
  • Praise:

    These intimate and intertwined poems gleam with a tenderness that belies their tensile strength. Lawrence mines consequential moments with sharp insight, revealing fissures in her life and the lives of those closest to her. Here is a sure-footed poet whose inventive language wrests bittersweet wisdom and uncommon grace out of the ordinary. Black Umbrella is an extraordinary collection, rich and indelible.

    —Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Following the River: Traces of Red River Women

    The poems in Black Umbrella chart a lifetime’s emotional weather in deft, compelling strokes. With insight, compassion, and piercing wit, Katherine Lawrence retraces the winds that blew her from steel town to prairie, mourns her losses, and reminds us that what we need is not the answers to all our questions, but "the true names." Black Umbrella is a beautiful, resonant book.

    —Susan Olding, Big Reader and Pathologies: A Life in Essays

    Katherine Lawrence’s Black Umbrella delves into "the sub-rosa conspiracy of the psyche," unearthing memories like tiny fragments of bone. Deeply personal, this work is a fearless recounting of love and betrayal, arrivals and departures, childhood trauma, love again. "Sly as a butcher’s thumb," Lawrence plays with language and imagery like a child with a knife. A precocious child. A sharp knife. Ultimately revealing a "brave, surefooted, animal self."

    —Mari-Lou Rowley, Unus Mundus

• Flyway
  • Awards and Honours:
    • Winner: 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
    • Shortlisted: Margaret McWilliams Award for Popular History
    • Shortlisted: McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

  A deeply personal long poem about migration and legacy and their resonance in a modern world.

  • Praise:

    None have rendered the wrenching of war’s dislocations with such intensity and beauty as Sarah Ens. Flyway is sorrow artfully spun into a lyric that mends as it quests, gathers, scatters, and laments. Her family’s story of the all too common women’s flight for survival emerges with intimacy and urgency. This book is a triumph for any time, but savor it now, as power and grace in a troubled world.

    —Julia Spicher Kasdorf

    Flyway situates itself as a poem in a biodiverse temporality where all species of home is rooted. Its address, O / downtrodden / stray, directed to those scrambling for purchase on a soft ridge of song is a balm so many people on the planet could use right now as they journey to be welcomed. The question that persists, that thrums beneath this poem is as simple and endangered as tallgrass: How do you remember home?

    —Sue Goyette

    Flyway charts the devastation and dislocation of war, a haunting that becomes an inheritance. Tracing migrations both inexorable and precarious, with the tallgrass as her teacher, Sarah Ens creates a work of imagination wider than the horizon.

    —Laurie D. Graham

    Flyway is a tender and urgent re-negotiation of place, displacement, memory, and war. The poems are elemental, touched by bread and metal, grass and stone.

    —Benjamin Hertwig