The Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize recognizes the best book of poetry published by a New Brunswick resident in a given year. Since 2016 the $500 prize has been sponsored by The Fiddlehead, Atlantic Canada's International Literary Journal. Established in 1945, The Fiddlehead is Canada's oldest literary journal, and its pages have featured a who's who of Canadian Literature. 2023 Award winner: Fawn Parker
Judge's citation: Fawn Parker’s Soft Inheritance provides a series of lovely portraits of her mother’s journey through illness and the spaces this journey opens up in her life. The poems are sparse and fragile with frequent turns to banality as a source of comfort. We are reminded of the futility of our daily rituals even as they are transformed by our confrontations with death, even as they transform our confrontations with it. “My mother laughed and applied her makeup,” the speaker of “Strawberry Thief” reports. But what is the result? “She talked freely about death.” Somehow, these disorientations offer up our truest self-representations. Parker’s tone is often wry and at times cynical. We are not just being led through poems of grief and love, we are being schooled in how to relearn grief and love. In particular, I loved the intimacy of this relationship: mother and daughter so deeply entwined, yet still struggling for relevance in each other’s scripts. While the poems dwell on several themes (love, beauty, the body, grief), and roam elsewhere with other people, they often return to this interwoven pair, as though no one and nothing else can compete with their bond, nonetheless verging on a kind of disintegration. A moving collection, poised perfectly between sardonic life and sad love. Matthew Gwathmey, Tumbling for Amateurs (Coach House Books); Fredericton
Allan Cooper, The Face of Everything (Pottersfield Press); Riverview 2022 Award Winner: Sue SinclairAlmost Beauty Goose Lane Judge Weyman Chan's Comments: "At surface glance, a Sue Sinclair poem draws its quotidian lines plainly. Then, as you dive deeper, ontological arguments of growth versus death, change versus integrity, proceed in whispers. The force of what it is to exist, consecrates the reader: “In the ruptured darkness / we grasp what we can and look within.” While her book Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems might be viewed as a best hits album, the consistent tone and range of these pieces are cumulatively stunning. The poet stays clear of sentiment, leaving stacked perspectives to tease out for her what it is to “anchor yourself / more firmly to the ground”. Cohesively, the author wins rare gems in plain sight. Quiet leaps in felt circumstance clarify for the reader “The density of being here, our lives an unearned / rescue.” Sinclair tempers then hones her empathic eye over humanity’s mistakes and hopes, “fascinated / by themselves and a little / ashamed.” Other Finalists Amber McMillan Wolsak and Wynn Michael Pacey Pottersfield Press
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Margo Wheaton is the author of Rags of Night in Our Mouths (McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2022) and Wild Green Light (Pottersfield Press, 2021),
a book she co-authored with David Adams Richards.
Her debut collection The Unlit Path Behind the House received the Fred Kerner Award from the Canadian Authors Association and was shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award, The Gerald Lampert Award, the Fred Cogswell Award, and the Relit Award.
Margo is an associate editor at The Dalhousie Review and works as a manuscript editor and writing coach.
2023 - Bertrand Bickersteth
2022 - Weyman Chan
2019 - D.A. Lockhart
2018 - Evelyn Lau
2017 - Susan Gillis
2015 - Anita Lahey
2021 - Isabella Yang
2020 - Yusuf Saadi