Poignancy wins poetry prize
June 20th, 2016
Joe Denham’s third book of poetry, Regeneration Machine (Nightwood Editions, $18.95), won the 2016 Canadian Authors Assocation (CAA) Award for Poetry. The prize is awarded to the Canadian author of the best work of poetry published in the preceding year. It’s a 100-stanza letter in verse to his deceased friend Nevin Sample who robbed a small credit union at gunpoint, then fled into the nearby forest with police in hot pursuit. Hidden by a stump at the edge of a small clearing, with the police calling out to him, Nevin Sample shot himself in the head. Rob Denham’s poems in his first collection Flux (Nightwood, 2003) are primarily written from a working class perspective. “Denham does for fishing on the West Coast what Peter Trower has done for logging: he writes with the voice of experience,” commented Robert Attridge in Event, Vol 33-3. His second collection is Windstorm (Nightwood 2009). Joe Denham’s first novel, The Year of Broken Glass (Nightwood, 2011), follows a struggling crab fisherman across the Pacific Ocean to deliver a glass fishing float to a high-paying collector. Against a backdrop of seismic degradation, the protagonist, Francis “Ferris” Wichbaun, has a romantic affair with his trans-ocean travelling companion while he is deeply concerned about his dual families: Ferris is married to Anna and they have a son named Willow, and simultaneously he has a baby daughter Emily with is girlfriend Jin Su. Denham has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry and Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He lives with his wife and two children in Halfmoon Bay, B.C. and works as a commercial fisherman throughout coastal British Columbia. 78-0-88971-8 $18.95
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