John Newlove Poetry Award
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rob mclennan - Poem after a line or two by Sylvia Legris

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011) and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottwater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

This year's judge was a.rawlings.

"From the department of curious Canadiana arrives a poem in conversation with the ecopoetic and disjunctive narrative fixations of writers countrywide. The poet nods to Legris nods to MacEwen. Left-aligned stanzas are interwoven with indented asides – or perhaps a poem within a poem. Both. Drenched and stretched, aurality translates what is not quite read. The text itself finishes mid-thought, or does not finish, or does not. Any. Either. All."

The annual John Newlove Poetry award, launched in the fall of 2004, commemorates the honest, poignant and well-written poetry of John Newlove, an Ottawa resident for almost twenty years and poet who died in 2003.

The 2 poems receiving honourable mention in 2011 are

rolling over forwards - Brigette de Pape
my mother’s piano - Benjamin Lancaster

Each year the winner will receive a certificate, A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, Edited by Robert McTavish (Chaudiere Books, 2007) and the opportunity to publish a chapbook through Bywords.
Poems published on bywords.ca from September 2011 to August 2012 will be eligible for consideration for next year's Newlove award. The judge for the 2012 award will be Gary Barwin.