Kananaskis by Kathleen McCracken

Kathleen McCracken has made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Kananaskis.

The winner of the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books. The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 14 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 21.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January and the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.

About Kathleen McCracken

Kathleen McCracken is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and a bilingual English/Portuguese edition entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems. She was a finalist for the WB Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition, the Montreal International Prize for Poetry, the Walrus Poetry Prize and the Grist ProForma Poetry Prize. In 2019 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. From 1992-2022 Kathleen was Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University, Northern Ireland.

McCracken longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize for her entry Tucson Boots.

Entry in five-ish words

"The maps inside the maps."

The poem's source of inspiration

"Kananaskis was occasioned by a drive on Alberta 40 from Canmore to Longview, through what is known as Kananaskis Country. The highway is flanked by pine forests and winds around mountains and over rivers — it's exquisite territory and we stopped more than once to, as I put it in the poem, 'let the sun/slide in.' That the Kananaskis River is named after a Cree pathfinder who in 1858 assisted John Palliser's 1858 British North American Exploring Expedition led me to wanting to say something about how place names like those attached to mountains in Kananaskis Country are too often not the names originally given by the First Nations peoples who live in and know the land intimately. Those in my view rightful place names, and the stories embedded in them, have across Canada too often been overwritten by the names and narratives of Anglo-European settlers."

First lines

Kananaskis

Driving Alberta 40 – the Bighorn Highway 

you pull off at Highwood Pass

to see the sun come up
 

behind the Misty Range. 

Check out the rest of the longlist

The longlist was selected from more than 2,700 submissions. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list.

The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is composed of Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin. 

The complete longlist is: 

• Borderland by Howard Anglin (Calgary)
• on the last day of ramzan, the moon makes the sun in its image by Manahil Bandukwala (Ottawa)
• Lament by Jessica Bebenek (Montreal)
• Citrus Dreams by Elena Bentley (Clavet, Sask.)
• When it's 9:48pm and the kids are asleep and you realize you've spent the entire night on your phone by Nicole Boyce (Calgary)
• ABC Gum by Devlin (Halifax)
• scar/city I by Daniela Elza (Vancouver)
• I Thought I Might by Tamsyn Farr (Wakefield, Que.)
• Score Before Cutting by Claire Gordon (Ucluelet, B.C.)
• There is no neutral way to say I was fourteen by Cicely Grace (Vancouver)
• After Icebergs by Matthew Hollett (St. John's)
• a house in O's name by Eimear Laffan (Nelson, B.C.)
• Gas Station Coffee by Paula Lemke (Langley, B.C.)
• magdalene sonnets by Louie Leyson (Vancouver)
• 吃苦 (Eat the Bitterness) by Emily Yiling Ma (Burnaby, B.C.)
• Kananaskis by Kathleen McCracken (Belfast, Northern Ireland)
• A Tenuous Life Act, I Lay Dreaming by Sasha Pickering (Halifax)
• Regeneration and other poems by Katherine Poyner (Nanaimo, B.C.)
• Girls of the Now by Dora Prieto (Vancouver)
• No Apples and Oranges by Marion Quednau (Sechelt, B.C.)
• i'll expect big things from the moon later tonight by c. a. r. rafuse (Ottawa)
• Song for the Earth and the Water by Harold Rhenisch (Vernon, B.C.)
• Palimpsest County by Rachel Robb (Toronto)
• Doom Scroll by Jenny Sampirisi (Toronto)
• Northern Childhood by Eleonore Schönmaier (Ketch Harbour, N.S.)
• Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile: Like Butterscotch by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
• The Killer and the Harpist by Catherine St. Denis (Victoria)
• The Rupture by Ayşe Lara Yildirim (Toronto)