Vancouver poet Adele Barclay won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for her debut collection, If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You (Nightwood Editions, $18.95) and it was nominated for the ReLit Award for best book of poetry and shortlisted for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. It also won the 2016 LitPop Award for Poetry and received the Reader's Choice Award for the 2016 Walrus Poetry Prize. Barclay's second poetry collection, Renaissance Normcore (Nightwood 2019) is recommended by her publisher for "tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate."

Her poems, according to publicity materials, "dwell in surreal pockets of the everyday warped landscapes of modern cities and flood into the murky basin of the intimate."

Barclay has been Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque, a poetry ambassador for Vancouver's Poet Laureate Rachel Rose, and the 2017 Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Victoria and researches modern and contemporary American poetry. Barclay's poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Matrix, The Pinch and others.

BOOKS:

Renaissance Normcore (Nightwood 2019) $18.95 978-0-88971-360-4

If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You (Nightwood 2016) $18.95 978-0-88971-327-7

[BCBW 2019]