Joseph Kidney’s Devotional Forensics has won the 2026 Canadian First Book Prize, presented by the Griffin Poetry Prize. Kidney is an award-winning poet whose work can be found in journals and anthologies around the world. Devotional Forensics is Kidney’s debut full-length collection, full of dazzling wit and brittle tenderness.
"It is a happy surprise to have won the Griffin Poetry Prize’s Canadian First Book Prize,” said Kidney. “I am grateful to the jury for selecting my book from among so many equally deserving Canadian debuts. I would also like to thank everybody at Goose Lane for the tireless work that has gone into having brought and continuing to bring this book into the world."
Channeling influences as wide as Shakespeare and Anne Carson, Virgil and John Ashbery, Devotional Forensics takes full advantage of the liberties of language, playing with its boundaries. This formally inventive collection exalts the ordinary and fleshes out the metaphysical, constructing theologies out of wildfires, classical music, and garbage collection, while engaging seamlessly with everything from renaissance literature to family intimacy, from modern art to biological science. At once timeless and urgent, Kidney’s poems dance through all the miniature apocalypses that compose the evolution of time into history.
Kidney will be participating in the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize Readings, which will be held at Koerner Hall in Toronto on Wednesday, June 3.
About the collection, the prize’s judges say: “Devotional Forensics is an adventure for the poetic imagination, at once intellectually rigorous and sensuous, restless in its interrogation of constructed realities. Moving between fire and water—those elemental extremes of intensity—the poems approach history and the present not as static records but as lived vibration. From minimal gestures and ordinary objects to moments of transcendence, the collection traces the intricate mechanisms binding the individual to circumstance, memory, and language itself. Most compelling is its fascination with language as a mechanism meant to dismantle itself: the word as hinge and binding, opening across temporalities, carrying fractures and continuities, allowing the past to speak again through the charged body of the poem.”
