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“Patrick James Errington’s ‘If Fire, Then Bird’ confronts embered landscapes of memory and loss in sonorous, sensory-rich language. These poems move with undeniable grace and attention, subtly adopting and subverting lyrical and pastoral tropes to pose tough questions about the fragile boundaries between health and illness, presence and absence, place and displacement. Like figures walking through the smoke from a burning field, Errington’s poems emerge with remarkable definition, clarity, and surprise.”

—2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Poetry Jury (Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, and Suzannah Showler)

“A tender, skillful, and moving storytelling achievement, ‘Watching, Waiting’ perfectly captures a child’s voice and understanding of the adult world. The bonds in a delayed father-daughter relationship are so delicately explored that readers are given pause at every cautious movement and each unspoken word. Deftly navigating familial and spatial geographies of shame, solidarity, and race, Teya Hollier moves effortlessly from comparing parents’ skin colour, to secret candy, to the contrasting experiences of zombie and princess trick-or-treaters in a fine form of the unexpected.”

—2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Short Fiction Jury (Erin Frances Fisher, Angélique Lalonde, and Derek Mascarenhas)