Arc Poetry Magazine Announces the Finalists for the 2021 Archibald Lampman Award

The Archibald Lampman Award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry by an author living in the National Capital Region.

This year's finalists are:

• Locked in Different Alphabets (Silver Bow Publishing) by Doris Fiszer;

• footlights (Radiant Press) by Pearl Pirie; and,

• A Different Wolf (McGill-Queen's University Press) by Deborah-Anne Tunney.

Selected by this year's jury of Mike Chaulk (Guelph), Rasiqra Revulva (Toronto), and Jane Munro (Victoria), Arc will honour these poetry collections and the continued high-quality of poetry coming out of Ottawa and the National Capital Region.

Here's what the jury had to say about these collections:

Doris Fiszer's Locked in Different Alphabets is an album of vivid moments from eight decades of an immigrant family's life. Her spare and insightful lyrics track growing up in Canada with an abusive brother; what she knows of her father's childhood in Poland, incarceration in a concentration camp, and undaunted feistiness. Finally, they focus on her mother, from "Wild Flower" in the Polish Home Army to foraging for fungi which flavour her goulash. Dangerous, trying, pleasurable-Fiszer's snapshots capture conflict and change, hope and horror, and the persistence of kinship and character through it all.

Pearl Pirie's footlights is a playful tribute to the momentary. Moving between philosophical and recognizable physical spaces, Pirie processes the quotidian with attention, insight, and humour. Warm-bodied and breathing, footlights is wonderfully peopled, executed through the subtleties of a syntax that reads with ease but shifts, tumbles, and dances. footlights feels like a call to look closely as it makes a case for any instance, however mundane-proving even our less spectacular, often unclocked, moments are worthy occasions for poetry.

Deborah-Anne Tunney's A Different Wolf is a meticulously conceived and brilliantly executed debut examining the cinematic and personal impact of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. With bladelike precision and an impeccable eye for detail, Tunney pierces the screen, the scene, and the man behind the camera; and invites the reader to gaze through the incision, into the ravenous heart revealed within. Challenging, seductive, voyeuristic, and entirely in command of both image and artifice, A Different Wolf is a thrilling collection sure to intrigue lovers of poetry and cinema alike.

Doris Fiszer is the author of Locked in Different Alphabets (Silver Bow Publishing) and two chapbooks: The Binders (Tree Press) and Sasanka (Wild Flower) (Bywords). She has won awards for her poetry including the 2017 John Newlove Award and Tree Press's 2016 Chapbook contest (for The Binders). The Binders was also a bpNichol Award nominee. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States. She lives in Ottawa.

Pearl Pirie is a queer concussed writer living in rural Quebec. Her poetry collection, the pet radish, shrunken (Book*hug, 2015) won the Archibald Lampman Award. Her manuscript Thirsts won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was published in 2011. Her poems have appeared in various anthologies, and her newest chapbooks are Call Down the Walls (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Water loves its bridges: Letters to the dead (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2020).

Deborah-Anne Tunney is a poet, short story writer and novelist who was born and lives in Ottawa. Her prose and poetry have appeared in Canadian, American and UK literary journals and anthologies. Her linked short story collection, The View from the Lane (2014) and her novel Winter Willow (2019) were published by Enfield and Wizenty. Her first book of poetry A Different Wolf came out in June 2020 from McGill-Queen's University Press.

The announcement of the Archibald Lampman Award winner will take place virtually at the Ottawa Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, October 20th at 6pm. The event will be hosted in partnership with the City of Ottawa and the Ottawa Public Library, virtually held on Zoom and streamed on Facebook Live.

Arc is grateful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa, as well as many individual supporters. For further information contact Arc Poetry Magazine at managingeditor@arcpoetry.ca.

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