Book Awards
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Montreal, June 11, 2005

The League of Canadian Poets Congratulates the Winners of the Lowther & Lampert Awards

The winners of this year's Lowther & Lampert awards were announced on Saturday, June 11, at a special awards banquet at the League's AGM in Toronto. Ray Hsu, winner of the Lampert Award for his book Antrophy, and Roo Borson who won the Lowther Award for Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, both gave readings from their winning volumes and accepted their awards. Short-listed authors K.I. Press (Lowther) and A.J. Levin, Steve McOrmond and Geoffrey Cook (Lampert) also gave short readings. Congratulations to the winners and to all of the short-listed authors!

The Pat Lowther
Memorial Award

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize.

Winner

Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida
Roo Borson
(McClelland & Stewart, 2004)
Like the spirit foxes in the Hiroshige cover illustration, the poems of Roo Borson can change shape seemingly at will. Here is a poet who can transform a poem with the simple placement of a period. In her beautiful book, Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, she works to rescue poetry from triviality while struggling with the recognition of its limits and attempts to reconcile loss and longing within a shifting world of global travel and fallible memory. Her guiding poetic ancestor, Matsuo Basho, could have no finer descendant.

Author's Bio: Roo Borson has published nine previous books of poems - including Water Memory (1996) and Night Walk: Selected Poems (1994), a finalist for the Governor General's Award - and has won awards for her poetry as well as for her essays. With Kim Maltman and Andy Patton, she is a member of the collaborative poetry group Pain Not Bread, whose first book, Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, was published in 2000. She lives in Toronto.

Lowther Jury: Eric Folsom, Miranda Pearson, Sheila Stewart

The Gerald Lampert
Memorial Award

The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year and carries a prize of $1,000.

Winner

Anthropy
Ray Hsu
(Nightwood Editions, 2004)
Inventive and surprising, Anthropy divides itself into third, second and first person. Hsu's work exhibits an astonishing range; his light, layered poems allude to various events and literary sources, from Walter Benjamin's suicide in Spain to Dante's Inferno, and from the death of James Dean to a failed family farm. This stunning debut probes history in search of the particular suffering and transcendence of the human soul: "The engine is a heart/A handful of nails."

Author's Bio: Ray Hsu grew up in Toronto. He studied at the University of Toronto, where his work was scored for performance at the Faculty of Music. His poetry has been published in Canadian and American journals, including Fence, The Fiddlehead, Exile, and The Literary Review of Canada. He is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lampert Jury: Ali Riley, Laurence Hutchman, Susan Gillis

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Contact:
Andrea Thompson, Promotion & Communications Manager
The League of Canadian Poets
920 Yonge St., Suite 608. Toronto, ON
Email: marketing@poets.ca
Phone: 416-504-1657