Margo Wheaton’s “The Unlit Path Behind the House” wins CAA 2017 Literary Award

We are pleased to share that MQUP poet Margo Wheaton is a Canadian Authors Association 2017 Literary Award-winner.

The Unlit Path Behind the House (Spring 2016) won the Canadian Authors Fred Kerner Book Award. It was also a finalist for two other 2017 awards: the League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia J.M. Abraham Poetry Award. The winners were announced at the association’s annual literary awards dinner and gala held in Toronto on June 24, 2017. Congratulations, Margo, and the rest of this year’s CAA Literary Awards winners!

 The day’s an old room / stripped of its furniture; there are / never enough beds in winter. / By late afternoon, the shadows /are forming a blue inconsolable hall // as sparrows retreat to makeshift / cots of pine bark and eaves. // Even the parched marsh grass / has stilled, every blade / become an ear.

Wheaton’s poems sing at the intersections where public and private worlds collide: the steady cadence of a boy carrying an unconscious girl in his arms, the afternoon journey of a woman taking books to prisoners, the rhythmic breathing of a homeless man asleep in a parking lot. Read more >