The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2024

Finalists judged by A.E. Stalling

Entries juried by Caroline Bird, Sadiqa de Meijer, Mai Der Vang, Danielle Legros Georges, Kaie Kellough, Randy Lundy, rob mclennan, Andrew McMillan, Vivek Narayanan, Damen O’Brien, Bianca Stone, and Sarah Wolfson

Founded in 2010, the Montreal International Poetry Prize has established itself as a major event in contemporary poetry. The 2024 anthology again listens for that vocal register capable of imagining justice and confessing desolation in tones at once private and resonant, the register that is the lyric. In forms recognizable and new, these poems speak their commentary and comment on their speech, plunging us into the sounds and self-reflections that distinguish poetic self-knowing as one of the oldest and highest arts. A door opens onto the unextinguished splendour of a lost mother’s life. An ice sculpture turns to vapour and back to ice again, like the poem on the page. A heart surgeon flies off into figurative language. A museum visitor sees herself in the glass of an archeological exhibit, in palindromic terms. A mind splits and sinks through trance-like repetition into the underworld in quest of a missing child.

A dedicated team of professors and students at McGill University recruited the distinguished international jury to sift the entries to the 2024 competition, and from those thousands, these sixty-five poems were chosen for their meaning to the average reader. A.E. Stallings, Oxford Professor of Poetry, then judged the finalists, selecting the one poem – included in this collection – to take the $20,000 prize. From Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and elsewhere, these lyrics voice a reality that you will recognize as strangely yours.