Margaret Christakos wins 2025 Nelson Ball Prize

The Nelson Ball Prize Committee is pleased to announce

the winner of the $1,000 Nelson Ball Prize for 2025

Margaret Christakos

for her book

That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press, 2024)

               

Thank you to the 2025 judges, 

Bev Daurio and James McDonald.

Here are their citations for the five books

shortlisted for the 2025 Nelson Ball Prize.

That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press)

by Margaret Christakos

Margaret Christakos is the author of more than a dozen full-length poetry collections, plus numerous chapbooks, a book of memoir/essays, and a novel. Her most recent collection of poetry, That Audible Slippage, is dedicated "to those listening," a phrase which may be heard variously as thanks (to the poet's dedicated audience), as acclamation (of listeners everywhere), or as a gently provocative invitation to the reader, a first attuning word: Are you listening? The question is not sounded, except in the reader. To whom the book is now dedicated ("How you are listening—." "Ear is both inside the body and outside of it like a hinge small and warm." The ear inside the body is not just part of a projected vocal-aural loop within the silent reader, it is a metaphor, an actual crossing and carrying into another realm, a realization. What makes this poetry so powerful is that the path opened by perception moves into channels beyond and below the percept, listens with mind and heart as much as ear, attending "the flow of discernible presences" unto the blurred edges ("fuzzed wing") of coming and passing away, "listening body into what is past," absence flowing in: "none of your beloveds/ live out here on the prairies// Yet they flow in you with/ ease & with/ insistence you// hear them." The apertures of mind through which the world flows—the products of our destructive false divinity as well as "Nature's obvious divinity"-give shape and movement to these poems (listening composed into language), but the overwhelming image and afterimage of the collection as a whole, from the opening lines "Way in or a way back/ walking," is the human, its verticality, carrying its branching, twittery, tree-mind in joy and sorrow.

Stone Hours (Rufus Books)

by Jeremy Clarke

At 335 pages, Stone Hours is hefty for a book of poetry. The cover is boldly designed on a warm grey background, with pale blue lettering and a splash of gold leaf (of a weathered Greek Cross? a rudimentary stone angel?). There are no blurbs and, even more unusual, no information about the author: the colophon at the end of the book is followed by a further, stray line of poetry. This impersonal quality, together with the elemental design, which in its choice of font and figure evokes vast periods of historical time, turns out to be the perfect foil for the intimacy of the first-person poems inside, lingering in the here and now of a modern city. Imagine a nature poet concerned with the coming-to-appearance of natural phenomena— the consciousness slowed to hold the blooming event or alert to discover, in an instant, the elusive or expansive detail-giving the same kind of attention to the sights and sounds of the modern city bathed in the miracle that there is anything at all. "Permanently exhausted, nimble as buildings, buses inch along. Great stumbling blocks that groan and grumble, hauling the cargoes of commuters in the stop start stop. The parked cars only slightly slower than the ones going past." The descriptions of mundane occurrence are frequently playful, with a touch of metaphysical pathos and humour reminiscent of Eugene Guillevic's personifications. I am reminded of Adorno: "the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption." Clarke is especially adept at describing the circling progressions of light, with a particular fascination for the crepuscular, and the entire project shares something of what Olson meant by an "archeology of morning."

Selected Memoirs (above/ground press)

by Peter Jaeger

Peter Jaeger is the author of several books and has written on a wide variety of topics, from ecology to John Cage. His chapbook Selected Memoirs addresses six and a half decades of one life, in thirty passages varying in length from twenty-five words to a couple of pages. Some passages cover several years, some only one. Much is missing; most of the life under consideration; yet the book feels complete and open at the same time. Its observations are as much by omission as by what they state; there are great gaps of time and context between some sections, between years, between sentences within entries. The passages and the spaces between them combine to create a perfect broken mashed-together record of existence, implying that much is forgotten.

Jaeger touches on the intellectual, the mundane, sweetness and regret, the greater world, the inner world, worlds imagined. There is a tipping between the real, and memory. Jaeger touches on horror (2001), a puzzling comment by a colleague 

(1997-98), unique experiences in the real world, "Scuba drift in the Red Sea" 

(2002-03) and times of want: "That winter Frank and I wore our heavy coats inside 

the house and clutched empty whiskey bottles filled with hot water to keep our hands warm." (1983).

Listing topics and descrying polarities and their subtle tensions, however, does not do the book justice, because so much of its joy is contained in its delicate, startling details and striking, unexpected shifts. The entry for 1966 reads: "Meditating in Bellwoods Park on a sunny afternoon in Toronto, I saw myself and the world as a continuous field of subatomic particles. I still remained deeply interested in the alphabet."

Although written in seemingly straightforward prose, Selected Memoirs is replete with moments of incredible writing, and a participatory poetics, where gaps and leaps ask the reader to consider all that is not there and what is hidden. Jaeger creates a small world of serenity, by turns warm, winsome, vulnerable, and quietly profound.

Inherent (Assembly Press)

by Kevin Stebner

Calgary artist, musician, and poet Kevin Stebner's first full-length book, Inherent, is a focused and fervid collection of concrete poetry dedicated to the release of the letters of our alphabet from the rigid strictures within which they are normally viewed. Stebner explains that he is "interested in how a typeface would wish to express itself if given the freedom to do so." In fourteen chapters, or sections, each using the letters of one typeface as its material, fonts-from the fine and curved, bold and savage, italic caps, outline, Gothic, accented, serif, to sans serif, and more-are collaged together into a series of images, using dry transfer, that abandon both grid and semantic restrictions. Stebner's sections vary from the exuberant bulldozer of "ultra matum," where the letters stack and seem to jump and fall like large puzzle pieces, to the neon curves of "brethren," to the fine elegant lines of "AdieuAdo." His visual poems totter and swirl, pile up, appear to advance, or to shyly shift away... A very few are symmetrical; some bulge or lopsidedly spill up or down, bloom roundly, or bunch like flying bricks. All seem to emerge from a mystical centre that feels present but would be hard to pin down, giving the entire book a boisterous feeling of kinetic flow and flight.

In Stebner's ludic process of deracination, liberation and recombination, something else also happens. The visuals themselves begin to resemble or call to mind the beautiful and artificial-stained glass, car hoods, robot heads, buildings, ornamental fixtures, mechanical blueprints-but also the organic world-resonating with lichen, a great slow tortoise, flowers, microscopic living things, gathered fish, tall grasses in wind, and more This mixing calls out to the reader of this book the deeper questions of the origins of language and of the alphabet itself, and whether they are things that are purpose-made or naturally occurring, among most human groups. In the tumbling delight of Inherent, Stebner reminds us that even when returned to the discipline of everyday text, typography and semantic utility, the letters of our alphabet, and the fonts in which they express their meanings are always also a graphic language of human emotion.

10:10 (Icehouse Poetry)

by Michael Trussler

Michael Trussler is an English professor, the author of seven books, and the recipient of many awards for his writing. His publisher tells us that his "work engages with the beauty and violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a neurodivergent, fluid perspective. His writing encompasses several genres and modes of expression, ranging from the lyrical to the avant-garde." It is difficult to encapsulate Trussler's approach, or his book 10:10, which could be described as a kaleidoscopic Bildungsroman, in poetry, of a consciousness profoundly altered by a deep aesthetic experence, his serendipitous encounter with the large art installation The Beanery, by Edward Kienholz, in 1978, at Amsterdam's Stedelik Museum. Written in a range of forms, from lyrical to dazzlingly experimental poetry, from interview to non-fiction and passages of autobiography, 10:10 also includes photographs, resonant with W. G. Sebald's similar inclusions.

10:10's layout is dense and complex, reflecting the noisiness and conflicts Trussler is addressing. One marvels at his images and lines, the breaks and jumps. The text is assertive, knowing, and impressive. At times, its brilliance is blinding.

James McDonald in conversation

with Margaret Christakos

Tell us about the evolution of this book.

That Audible Slippage came together over about five years. In 2017-18, as writer-in-residence at The University of Alberta, I was actively involved in learning, in meeting people, contributing mentorship and events, and engaging with community. At the same time I knew I needed to be writing on a parallel cusp of grieving and bearing death, recently having lost both a marriage and my mother. I wanted to pay more attention to all of my senses in terms of inviting the responsibilities of perception and embodiment, and I found my poetry returning more deeply to the activity of soundwork. Many of the poems were spawned because I was repeatedly awoken at precisely 8 a.m. when my hosts' radio alarm flicked onto the local news. I didn't know how to stop it! So I began waking to the alarm and immediately writing poems, starting each one ejected from the hypnagogic pavillion of whoozy dreams into concrete public human events, emergencies, infrastructures and contests. Back and forth— started inhabiting that space of responsibilities more, deeply learning as a guest on Indigenous land, and working with concepts of the heard, the unheard, and the not-yet heard.

How does this book fit into your work as a whole?

I've engaged with a lot of varied compositional and improvisational practices, applying many procedures, as well as inviting the domestic and lyric, to cultivate new work. I like writing quite different work at the same time, inviting the manuscripts to tumble around and overlap each other as I'm finding the work's shape.

In this book, I am interested in how writing and drawing summon the poet into a similarly fervent state of attention. Often this involves walking through outdoor spaces and deliberate environmental noticing as well. The "Listening Line Notebook" sequence was written in pitch darkness on my fourth-floor balcony in Kensington Market, overlooking the intersection of Spadina and Nassau. For months I was doing a lot of durational drawing and blind drawing, where I'd allow one single ongoing line by touch alone to continue evolving into a complex drawing. Some of the lines were drawn with two hands simultaneously.

Using this kind of attentive bearing also let me think more about how the process of writing is a closely related physical inhabitation—have always written primarily by hand. The compositional energy flows from the handwriting in sync with an open invitation to language to take shape.

The Nelson Ball Prize is given to a work forefronting poetry of observation. How would you interpret the idea of "poetry of observation"?

For me there's an improvised objectivist commitment to looking and listening and taking ones cue from the detailed ongoingness of what can be seen and heard, and smelled, and touched, and noticed in time. Instead of finding all the writing material in one's head, or in dreams or memory, you try to remain present and activated within the dynamic noticing and naming of the concrete world around you, almost the way it physically feels to draw or photograph or touch. Of course, this always leads to mutable leanings back into the conceptual world, with its constantly shifting abstractions and conjurings. Luckily, we can't resist the reality that every part of the alphabet itself is an infinite object that can be observed and activated—a very bp concept.

Do you know Nelson's work?

No, not yet. I was formed as a young poet perhaps most through the influence of bpNichol in the early 1980s and many of the contemporary circles of Canadian poets who were actively improvising and exploring particularly interdisciplinary poetry and performance. The influence of Nicole Brossard and very early Erin Moure were also key formations for my sense of the broader political responsibilities of poetry. I soon became practised in writing progressions such as "holding/wholding/worlding/ wording" and "shake/shimmy/tremour/metabolize/sift/shape-shift."

I was in visual arts at York University, but my second-year creative writing prof was bp, and very soon he had us going downtown to meet the thriving experimental poetry community. Lovely that Michael Trussler, who was in several of the same poetry courses at York, is also shortlisted for the Nelson Ball Prize!

What's next for you?

As an experimental Canadian poet without a scrap of pension despite 30+ years of teaching, it is important to mention that the purse of this prize means a lot to me and I am keenly grateful for it. I aspire to continue evolving my body of work, including the manuscript in process to begin in an arena unrecognized as a beginning, which is an aspiring aleatory text that welcomes the footfall of language moving in multiple vectors at once.

In May of 2026 | will be spending some time at Banff, which I'm greatly looking forward to. Currently, I have three manuscripts in process, hundreds of drawings, and thousands of serial digital photographic collage works made from 2014 to the roiling present. I will write poems about the in/finite future that behave as if knit into stitches (if it is/ it is if/ it if is/ is it if'). Reaching for language is the act of possibility that has always made sense. This prize connects me with the fastidious love of poetry that Nelson embodied, and I am grateful for our connection.

Congratulations to all the poets shortlisted

for the 2025 Nelson Ball Prize.

The Nelson Ball Prize Committee extends abundant gratitude

to the Estate of Nelson Ball and all the individuals whose donations

have made this prize possible.

The Nelson Ball Prize Committee:

James McDonald

Stuart Ross

Catherine Stevenson

For information on nominating books for the 2026 Nelson Ball Prize,

write to ne/sonballprize@gmail.com.