For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

Entries juried by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Martin Breul, Heather Christle, Nabina Das, Liz Howard, Joanne Limburg, Conor O’Callaghan, Tanure Ojaide, Michael Prior, Medrie Purdham, Mark Tredinnick, and Rhian Williams

Finalists judged by Lorna Goodison

Founded in 2010, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has established itself as a major event in contemporary poetry, both in Canada and around the world. The 2022 anthology continues the work of its predecessors, building the community of contemporary poetry on the twin principles of aesthetics and accessibility. Under this banner – poetry is for everyone – these poems speak of historic desolation and everyday bravery. Their images grip and hold. Here common experience crystallizes into stanzaic form, lending dignity to life in a ravaged world; here poetry melts into a rising, increasingly acidic ocean of prose that weeps for a prior earth.

From thousands of entries, these sixty poems were chosen for the virtue of their speaking to the reader, artfully and clearly. Lorna Goodison, winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, then judged the finalists, selecting the one poem – included here – to take the $20,000 prize. From Canada, Australia, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Romania, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, these lyrics voice a reality that you will recognize as strangely yours.

States of Emergency is a book-length poem about the apocalyptic present, written in a language whose meaning is liquid and full of slippage, always spilling out from its container. In Yoyo Comay’s hands, words roil, churn, and surge. By taking on different mood and modes, from the prophetic to the colloquial, he has created a form that is a constant unravelling—a leap of faith into intuitive meaning, a letting go into ongoingness. “I am catapulted into where I am,” he writes, “and the air concusses around me.”

Comay sees poetry as a visceral experience: a state of immanence, embodiment, emergence, emergency. This is poetry as diary and seismograph, an infinite scroll for the end of days. It is a debut like no other.