I would love to share them with anyone who wants to know them: Duncan Mercredi,Marie Annharte, Rosanna Deerchild, Beatrice Mosionier, and Trevor Greyeyes. I know and am blessed to spend time with so many amazing writers and storytellers. Do you think this win will draw attention to other work being produced by your colleagues? Natalie Zina Walschots: You’re a passionate and active member of the Writers’ Collective of Manitoba. More than that, it is a deeply indigenous story, and I think Canada is hungry for stories from and about its first people. That pretty much describes the whole “Canadian experience” right there. It’s about a young girl or woman struggling with identity and place. This collection is an intensely personal story, but it is also nothing new. Katherena Vermette: My friend Duncan has always told me the most personal is the most universal.

As young women transform into clever, daring birds, and memories are as strange and muffled as music heard through a wall, North End Love Songs embraces the difficulties, the stumbling and the groping, and all the chilly, ugly elements than can nonetheless combine into a sense of place and home. The collection’s subjects are often wounded and sometimes disappear, as both the inner and outer landscapes that Vermette explores have the tendency to turn hostile. Populated by riot grrls and heavy metal boys, these North End Love Songs are loud and heightened, but also possess a surprising vulnerability. Set in and inspired by Winnipeg’s North End, Vermette’s poetry explores a landscape that she at once rejects in pieces like “Poised for Flight,” but elsewhere speaks of with a great sense of love and longing. The love that sits at the core of Katherena Vermette’s North End Love Songs-winner of this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language poetry-is not simple or serene, but pugnacious and ferocious, something to be alternately fled from as well as embraced.

Natalie zina walschots