Souvankham Thammavongsa on the 'great great courage' of Kayla Czaga's debut poetry collection

April is National Poetry Month! To celebrate, CBC Booksrecently reached out toCanadian poets and askedthem whichCanadian poetry book has been meaningful to them.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is an award-winning author and poet whose debut short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Her poetry collections include the Trillium Book Award winner Light, the ReLit Award winner Small Arguments and 2019's Cluster, a wide-ranging collection of ruminations on nature, family and politics written in Thammavongsa's celebrated minimalist style. Cluster was a 2020 finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

• Calling all poets! The CBC Poetry Prize is now open

A Canadian poetry book that is meaningful to Thammavongsa is Kayla Czaga's debut poetry collectionFor Your Safety Please Hold On, published in 2014.Czagais a Canadian poet who wason the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize longlistforDrunk River.

"I really love Kayla Czaga's For Your Safety Please Hold On. So tender and real and so much life and pain and love and just great great courage. I admire how she can use a single word and give it a force and change its matter every time the word is repeated and turned out in a poem (see Poem for Jeff).

So tender and real and so much life and pain and love and just greatgreat courage.

"What I love most is how there's room not to know and love the idea of poetry to let poetry fail you and to live in its failure anyway. Her lines 'I don't get poetry either. I mostly get cavities...'are so fun to read and to say out loud and to open with that line is so wonderfully bold."