Empires of the Everyday by Anna Lee-Popham

An ambitious and wholly original poetry collection that examines the ways that life is confined and sometimes defined by the city and the ubiquity and invisibility of state violence.

The poems in Empires of the Everyday give voice to the many "you" who move through a cityone that resembles many modern citieswhere plywood shelters are demolished in pandemic winters. Where everyday violence is palpable, but the related media reporting is offhand, cool, distanced, piecemeal, uncontextualized.

In an attempt to access a more revelatory language, the poems spar with an AI translator, disturbing the disease of twenty-first century life that the city makes solid and covers up. Slavery, permanent war, and Empire titter in the resulting language, in its bending of what is possible, as only poetry can do. The poems trace the relationship between the human "you" and the machine "I" through five powerful, nuanced, and thought-provoking episodes. Anna Lee-Popham's impressive debut collection is immersed in the current ruptures of the world, rendering a translation of Empire and beyond-Empire to a possible convergence for "you" and "I." (FromMcClelland & Stewart)

• Books by past CBC Nonfiction Prize finalists being published in 2024
• 13 poetry collections by past CBC Literary Prizes winners and finalists from 2024

Anna Lee-Popham is a poet, writerand editor in Toronto. She is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing at the University of Guelph, the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University and University of Toronto's School of Continuing Education creative writing certificate, where she received the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Her writing was the first runner-up inPRISM international's Pacific Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Fiddlehead'sCreative Nonfiction Contest and has been recently published in Arc, Riddle Fence, Canthius and Autostraddle. She co-hosts the Emerging Writers Reading Series and was an editor at HELD magazine. Lee-Popham was on thelonglist for the 2022 CBC Nonfiction PrizeforIn the Hours After.