Tag Frog Hollow Press

Bailey Prize

shaneneilson

I just learned I won the Bailey Prize from the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick for my poetry manuscript about the Wolastoq/Saint John River, what will be my final entry in the NB trilogy. This win is terribly meaningful for me, being someone who wrote the first book of poetry criticism on the Maritime region (Margin of Interest); who brought into being the re-boot of the New Brunswick Chapbook Series with Frog Hollow Press; who has a new instantiation of New Brunswick-focused chapbooks with Gordon Hill Press; and whose every word comes from NB. I doubt many people reading this even know who Bailey was, or his work. You should. My thanks to my home. Here’s the note from judge Neil Aitken: “I was really caught off guard by the ambition and complexity of this manuscript, and more than that, how successful these poems were in weaving together so many threads: the ecological, the literary, the historical, the tensions between settler and Indigenous ways of encountering land and water, and the desire to give the river and the land voices that were both intimately aware of the human while somehow also being older and stranger than human. The poems move and shimmer with lyric beauty and nuance, while also connecting to a wider network of literary reference. What a remarkable accomplishment – and what an incredible poetic triumph of imagination!”

Unfit Criticism 1-6

shaneneilson

A record of lifelong dedication to poetry criticism.

1 (retractable devil horns: criticism 1999-2018):

“Poisonous Frame”; “Public Hanging”; “Harbourfront Pigs and Lipstick”; “Rules of Thumb for an Aspiring Critic”; “Pretending to be Great”; “High School Confessional”; “Measured Advice”; “Reaching for Al Purdy”; “Solway the Sad Balladeer”; “Critics at Large”; “The Invisible Man is in your Caesura”; “Introduction to The Pre-Poem Moment“; “Eventual Development”; “McCartney Sings the Blues”; “Recovering the Stars”; “Beauty and Representing Mental Illness”; “Interpreting the Interpreter of Dreams and Culture”; “True Words in the Word Cloud”

2 (personal investments): “Time and Fever”; “Freedom”; “Language on Holiday”; “The Festival of No More Words”; “Explosions”; “Finnegan’s Wake in the Porridge Universe”; “Borrowing Magic”; “David Shields and the Laziness Inherent”; “Coda”; “The Poetics of Plot”; “Zero Chronology”; “But Transcendence”; “How Bad is this Book?”; “It’s Not All About the Brain”; “Healey and Goliath”; “The Paradox I’m Really Pulling For”; “Anticlimax”; “Nice Try, Dostoevsky”

3 (marginal): “How Not to Represent a Region: Coastlines and Overfishing”; “The Backwoods Sobriquet”; “Regionalisms 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond: Reading Maritime Poetry Anthologies Backward”; “Foosty Boost: The First Two Books of Anne Compton”; “Dr. Acorn, or: How I Joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and Learned to Love the Stern Nurse Fusion Bomb Sun”; “We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Progressive White Male & Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems“; “Heroes & Legends: Finding John Thompson with Peter Sanger”; “Visiting Lane”; “Visiting Wayne Clifford”; “Crossing the Campus”; “Clifford the Not-Sonneteer”; “A shared text is an act of friendship”; “Math, Satire, and Sense: David Helwig’s Seawrack“; “In Some More Distant Key: an Interview with David Helwig”; “Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: on J.J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds“; “Return to Scoudouc: A Review of Chaisson’s To Live and Die in Scoudouc“; “Rabbittown Press, David Brewer, Prop.”; “Obituary”; “Angelic Salutation.”

4 (the negative review season one):

“Return of Thematic”; Spoiled Identity and the Frozen Now”; “Crito Revolta”; “Missing Vision”; “Like My Dad, Rapping”; “Dionne Brand is the Most Powerful Poet in Canada”; “The Rebranding”; “CanLit Twitter Matchmade me and Holy Wild“; “The Protest is this Way”; “The Neilson Ratings”

5 (the negative review season 2): “Rocky Mountain Opportunity”; “How the Hell Did Waldo get Published by Dionne Brand? A Tetraptych”; “Sharing and Staring: I Give Best Canadian Poetry 2021 a 1/3 of a Pea rating on Goodpeas (max 5 peas)”; “The Topic of Whiteness in Canadian Poetry”; “Reviewing Reviewing”; “Runaway Griffin Jury 2022”; “Imaginary Griffin 2022 Conversations”; “Can Kevin Connolly Do Anything Right?”; “Maybe . . . Recuse?”

6 (the negative review season 3): “Trend Unsettler”; “Behind the Progressive Times”; “Science Flowers”; “Essaya*ona*Selecteda*Poemsa*ina*Threea*Partsa*”; “The Mid to Mild Kinglet”; “Unpublishing the Archive”; “Men at Play”; “Repetition and Gallstones”; “No Joke”; “On Wunker’s The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth-and-Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry“; “All’s Punny in Ding-Dong Land”; “Marred by Association”; “Losers Gotta Lose: Smile for the Screenshots”; “The Marvel Superhero Movie Post-Credits Scene: TNR Project Debrief”