Rachel Zolf wins Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Rachel Zolf, author of Human Resources, has won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. The winners of the 2008 Trillium Book Awards were announced by Ontario Minster of Culture Aileen Carroll at a luncheon hosted by the Ontario Media Development Corporation on Thursday, June 12. Congratulations, Rachel!<!--newline--><!--newline-->The news of Rachel's win has spread far and wide, even hitting popular gay and lesbian newsblogs, like afterellen.com and www.pinknews.co.uk.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Here is the Trillium judges' citation:<!--newline--><!--newline-->With biting satire and appropriate outrage, Rachel Zolf's tour de force collection examines the newspeak network of commerce, branding and the internet and pinpoints the spaces inside language where it intersects, exploits, collides, and attacks individual conscience and public consciousness. Bracing, funny, ominous, and completely original, Human Resources looks at our degraded argot from the inside, exposing its manipulations and manipulators while it urgently plots an eleventh-hour escape route.<!--newline--><!--newline--><!--newline-->Rachel Zolf made a very insightful speech upon the acceptance of the awards, and we have received requests to reprint her words. The text of the speech follows:<!--newline--><!--newline-->Thank you very much to the Trillium funders and jury for the gift of this award. It’s particularly timely for me because the process of writing this book, inspired by my work writing for and about money, actually compelled me to quit my job. After writing countless articles, brochures, ads and websites about private jets, exquisite gardens and offshore-banking havens, it seems I ran out of words, once I used the few I had left in the book. So now that I just write poetry -- for pretty much no money -- any resource influx truly does feel like a gift. <!--newline--><!--newline-->I'd also like to thank Alana, Christina, Stan, Evan and everyone else at Coach House -- for your support for my work and for being so professional and great to work with. And my partner Kate for her continuous support, including reading the manuscript countless times in its many drafts, a particular feat given that the first time she read it she apparently wanted to kill me twice by the time she got to page 43. <!--newline--><!--newline-->Indeed I'm very pleased that the jury recognized a book deemed 'experimental' or 'innovative' -- or Kate might say nearly impossible to read! Seriously, these days such recognition is unfortunately rare in our relatively conservative awarding, granting, reviewing and publishing environment. This general resistance to innovative writing is striking compared to our general acceptance of, and sometimes even hunger for, visual art, for example, that challenges our sensual and receptive limits. While it eventually became (kind of) okay to bring a urinal into an art museum it's still not particularly okay to publish poetry that messes with received language and syntax and includes vocabulary that isn't pretty -- some might even say 'dirty.' This resistance to reading what is commonly deemed 'difficult' poetry perhaps reflects a prevailing attitude that literature should simply comfort or uplift us or bring us to epiphany -- and not necessarily challenge us beyond that to think, or even live, differently. It could be because we're in a time of such monumental civic, economic, environmental and human rights crises that sometimes there is an impulse to conservative thoughts and experiences, to cling to what we have and what we know for fear that that might disappear too, along with the ice caps, our health and our unlimited access to oil. All this to say I feel fortunate to be the beneficiary of a jury willing to stretch their reading minds beyond what's comfortable and easily known.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Especially in a time of increasing world crisis, I believe it's the responsibility of all artists -- and all readers -- to break through the smooth surfaces of structures that surround us, whether they be faceless architectures plastered with ads, the fourth wall in a theatre, or language touching a blank page or blue computer screen. Because that moment of breakage is rife with possibility. Artists are uniquely situated to articulate responses that challenge received notions of knowledge, meaning, value and mastery. We have this amazing, yes, sacred gift to potentially change the way the molecules swish around in all of our brains, literally altering the way people think, and that is a powerful tool for mobilization. At the risk of sounding like a U.S. candidate for president, I believe that if we all open our minds to new ways of making literature and making meaning we can indeed enact new ways of making change. Again, thank you.<!--newline--><!--newline--><!--newline-->