The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry in English from the shortlist of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry from the shortlist of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections. Featuring works from shortlisted poets Victoria Chang, Changtai Bi, Joseph Dandurand, Canisia Lubrin, Valzhyna Mort, Srikanth Reddy, Yusuf Saadi, Tracy K. Smith, and Yi Lei.

“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

“You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not. You really are living, though, even if you’re dead, because you do have poetry, poetry’s with you whether or not you know it...” Great Silent Ballad, beloved lyric poet A.F. Moritz’s twenty-second volume of poetry, in visionary terms forwards the assertion that poetry, a primordial reality, is in the current moment both the equal of, and the antidote to, the rest of present-day civilization and its suicidal nature. The book unfolds in seven short sections that probe such topics as the crucial value of childhood; a human person’s development through maturity and age; the perennially avant-garde nature of great poetry no matter what time and place; and poetry’s inherent involvement with hope and creativity, life and feeling, freedom and love. Great Silent Ballad also reprises Moritz’s longstanding celebration of common human conversation, the apex of which (he argues convincingly) is what we call “poetry”—meaning not just the art of verse, but our total access to the goodness of natural existence.

In June 2001, the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize for the best book of poetry published in English in 2000 was awarded to two poets: one Canadian and one international. The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology includes selections from the remarkable shortlisted books chosen by jurors Carolyn Forche, Dennis Lee, and Paul Muldoon. The selections from the international shortlist include poems from the translation by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open; Fanny Howe's Selected Poems; Les Murray's Learning Human: Selected Poems; and the translation by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh of Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan. The selections from the Canadian shortlist include poems from the translation by Robert Bringhurst of Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas' Nine Visits to the Mythworld; Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours; and Don McKay's Another Gravity.

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award • Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize “These lyrics…illustrate poetry’s unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world.” —Washington Post Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Award for Poetry, “give[s] us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Falling Awake expands on the imagery of fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad portrayed in her previous volume, Memorial—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower. FROM “VERTIGO” let me shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain starting right now lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson has been a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in the West Indies, Simpson immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. He studied at Columbia University, then served the US Army in active duty in Europe during World War II. After the war he continued his studies at Columbia and at the University of Paris. While living in France, he published his first book of poems, 'The Arrivistes' (1949). The poems in 'Struggling Times' find Simpson's distinct imaginative voice working at its full poetic power. Both timely and personal, the poems reveal Simpson's ongoing quarrel with suburban America, as well as the American government's struggle to retain its integrity and honor in the midst of its own aggression and worldwide strife. 'You have to be careful' 'what you hear or see.' 'In Afghanistan I saw' 'the man and the woman' 'who were caught in adultery' 'buried up to their heads.' 'Their children were brought' 'and told to throw stones.' 'I can still see the heads' 'twisting on the ground.' 'The poor devil in' Papillon 'with his head in the guillotine . . .' 'but Goya's half-buried dog' 'looking up at the sky' 'I think was the worst of all.' "This is the Jamaican-born Simpson's 18th collection; its dry trimeters and tragic resignations should certainly please the faithful fans... Yet the new poems, as much as any in his oeuvre, leave room for unexpected happiness... Simpson believes in endurance and the rewards of the ordinary. He can, at his best, make his readers believe in those things too." - Publishers Weekly Louis Simpson 's last book, 'The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001', (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003) was finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His other honors include the Prix de Rome, Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and the Columbia Medal for Excellence.