Griffin Prize

Literary awards can be a mixed blessing: Designed to reward excellence, they also create inflated expectations. We often hear readers say that they are "pleasantly surprised" by an obscure book and

"generally disappointed" by major award winners.

In Canada, no literary award is more generous or, arguably, more prestigious than the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Nerve Squall (Coach House, 112 pages, $17), Saskatoon writer

Sylvia Legris's third collection, is neurotic in the best sense. Edgy and unsettled, the poems are also whimsical and fluid.

"Crossing the nerve squall is crossing from eye wall to eye," she writes in Nerve Storms, highlighting the interior weather at work in the book.

Legris's writing doesn't so much link images as it picks them up, carries them for a while, and then puts them down in a different spot.