Jury Comments

Power and sex take centre stage in Robin Richardson’s formidable third collection, Sit How You Want. Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: “When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy.” In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson’s poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: “It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate.”

Robin Richardson is the author of two previous collections of poetry. She has won the Fortnight Poetry Prize in the UK, The John B. Santorini Award, Joan T. Baldwin Award, and has been shortlisted for the CBC, Walrus, and ARC Poetry Prizes, among others. She lives in Toronto and is Editor-in-Chief of Minola Review.

Jury Comment: The poems in Robin Richardson’s Sit How You Want are hot and cool, exposed and demure, and full of ferocity and sass. The speaker of these poems uses a keen eye, a biting wit, and a musical ear to record and transcend the obstacles life has placed around her. The narrator seems to suggest that it is not enough to confront trauma, grief, and the threat of sexual violence in poetry, but that this art form can be masterfully used to flaunt scars, invite confrontation, and dive deep into the rich sensuality of experience in her equally fierce and fragile existence. This speaker’s voice emerges as if from a chrysalis, but these sharply carved words do not form a butterfly, but instead a tender scorpion.