Congratulations to Jordan Scott winner of the 2018 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize! His works include Silt, Blert, and Night & Ox. The Prize is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.
“And I could live my life this way / in strokes of / worktree / glowtops / orange trails / leftover hair / a body’s / sonic fictions. Jordan Scott savours and vies not solely with the materiality of language, but language’s subjective materiality. For Scott, each context and uttering body manifests an original materiality: the precision of nature, anatomy, the names of friends, the contours of British Columbia or Poland, the daily ritualized cycles of parenthood and the cosmos. His associations, insinuations, discoveries, tensions, and mysterious propulsive force—these manifestations of his consciousness—are wondrous. I could live / drawing curtains / looking out / of sorewater / transcendentals / down to / morning / again to / bind me in / joyride dress / tie me to / lightveins.” —2018 Jury Citation (Wayde Compton, Sylvia Legris, and Moez Surani)