Eli MacLaren et al.

Founded in 2010, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has established itself as a major event in contemporary poetry, both in Canada and around the world. The Montreal Prize Anthology 2020 explodes with talent, combining radiant vision with striking invention in form. The loss of a father finds equivalence in a tornado’s blowing an apartment open to the night sky. Sacred and profane images of a mother pile up in couplets, making a heap of gold. Family memory stirs in the dreamy measures of a sestina. Racial injustice is defied and reversed in the unflinching mirror of a palindromic poem. A doctor confesses her life work to be a striving to right the wrong done her father. These poems, a handful of the thousands submitted to the 2020 competition, were chosen for the lone virtue of their speaking directly to the reader, with conviction and with art.

In 2019, the founder of the Montreal Prize, Asa Boxer, transferred it to the Department of English at McGill University. A team of dedicated faculty and graduate students recruited a distinguished international jury, headed by Pulitzer-prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa, to judge the entries. This book is the result.

Arthur Mayse

Drug-runners threaten the West Coast!

A semi-conscious man looks about a boat's cabin as a woman presses a wet cloth to his forehead. She's young, her nails are short, and her small hands are calloused. When another man tries to enter, she grabs a gun: "If you come down here, Joe, I'll shoot you."

For a moment, the intruder doesn't move. "I don't want your damn' old hulk," he tells her. When the woman threatens a second time, he leaves. "You'd better too," he says. "She's near sunk."

So begins the story of Clint, a reform school runaway, and Devvy, an orphaned farm girl saddled with a deceitful drunk of a stepmother. Clint and Devvy are pushed together as they struggle against the corrupt, criminal, violent adults trying to exert control over their lives.

Perilous Passage first appeared in 1949 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. It has since been published in hardcover, paperback, and in Swedish translation. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1952.

Alexie Morin

A much-celebrated auto-fictional feminist memoir, finally available in English.

In this frank and unforgettable book, celebrated Québécois writer Alexie Morin becomes the subject of her own story as she places a childhood friendship under a microscope. An autobiographical novel set in a small industrial town in Quebec during the 1990s, Open Your Heart recounts the story of a difficult friendship between two girls brought together by illness and operations suffered at a young age. One girl suffers from severe strabismus, while the other was born blue. The first, defiant, feels that something is wrong with her, while the second is an angelic child loved by all. One becomes a writer, and the other dies at eighteen, during an operation that should have saved her life.

In this debut novel, Morin stakes out an exceptional pursuit for truth in these old memories as she grapples with death, love, bonding and solitude.

Jenny Boychuk

Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk’s poetry debut, addresses a harrowing subject: the loss of the poet’s mother to addiction. Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together. Poem after poem attempts to wring clarity from memories ripe with trauma and love, as Boychuk questions whether it is possible for a child to ever extricate herself from an abusive parent—to become, as it were, a living “antonym” of a painful family legacy. A booklength loss-lyric of vivid beauty, Antonyms for Daughter is a singular example of grief transformed into art.