Danny Jacobs shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry
New Brunswick poet Danny Jacobs has been shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry for his book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories (Nightwood Editions)—an honest and playful collection that explores our connection to the world through humour and wordplay.
In this exciting debut, Jacobs animates the relationships we have with the idealized rural and the newly urban. Many of the poems are inspired by the beautiful rural landscapes of the Maritimes, with their freshly cut acreages, rusted lawn mowers and fossil beaches. Others are drawn from Jacobs’ experiences working in the call centres that opened in a dying mall in his suburban hometown of Riverview, NB. Similar outfits sprang up all over New Brunswick during the ’90s. By focusing on the call centre he is able to articulate the ambivalent feelings that come with seeing the various guises of economic and commercial development in Maritime small towns, and also play with the Canadian poetry conventions
After living in a number of places across the Maritimes, Danny Jacobs now lives in Riverview, the town in which he was born and raised. He works as a librarian in the nearby village of Peticodiac, NB. His poems have been published in a variety of journals across Canada.
The Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry is awarded to a Canadian poet whose work follows in the tradition of Acorn, Livesay, Purdy, Plantos and others by being accessible to all people in its use of language and image. Other nominees are: Marita Dachsel for Glossolalia (Anvil Press); Kanina Dawson for Masham Means Evening (Coteau Books); Lisa Shatzky for Blame it on the Moon (Black Moss); and Ann Shin for The Family China (Brick Books). The winner will be announced in November.
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