The West Coast Book Prize Society has announced Coldstream’s Laisha Rosnau’s poetry collection, Our Familiar Hunger, as a finalist for this year’s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Our Familiar Hunger is a book about the strength, will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women and how those relationships and shared knowledge interact, inform, transform and burden. These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place; they are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of the epigenetic grief we carry and the myriad ways that interferes or interprets our best attempts.
Rosnau is the author of The Sudden Weight of Snow, which received an honourable mention for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Rosnau’s first collection of poetry, Notes on Leaving, won the 2005 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award.
Her second, Lousy Explorers, was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman.
The other finalists for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize are Fred Wah and Rita Wong for beholden, a poem as long as the river (Talonbooks), Shazia Hafiz Ramji for Port of Being (Invisible Publishing), Eve Joseph for Quarrels (Anvil Press) and Onjana Yawnghwe for The Small Way (Caitlin Press). The winners will be announced at the BC Book Prizes Gala on May 11, at the Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront in Vancouver.
Rosnau’s poetry collection, Our Familiar Hunger (Nightwood Editions) costs $18.95.
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