Good Morning. God of Missed Connections has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry. I'm proud to be on the list with many excellent poets including Sina Queyras, Laisha Rosnau, Damian Rogers, and Karen Solie. A fifth, Ronna Bloom, is unknown to me, but I will fix that shortly.
The Pat Lowther Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The judges for this year's award were Gloe Cormie, Maureen Hynes, and Rhea Tregebov. Here's what they have to say about the book,
"God of Missed Connections is an ambitious and valiant collection that boldly addresses the fraught history of Ukraine with delicacy and outrage, grace and indignation. Bachinsky’s adroit poetry takes on Stalin’s holodomor (death by famine) of the 1930’s, as well as the lasting devastation of the 1986 nuclear reactor meltdown at Chernobyl. Canadian history also is implicated in the catalogue of injustices, as Bachinsky powerfully documents the internment of Ukrainian-Canadians (and others) during and after the First World War. The complex subjectivity in which these poems are grounded generates a clarity of political intent, making for poems imbued with a compelling integrity."
