Joelle Barron and Dominique Bernier-Cormier are among those longlisted in the 2019 League of Canadian Poets Book Awards on April 1, 2019.

Ritual Lights is longlisted for the 2019 Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards, awarded for a debut book of poetry. These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.

Joelle Barron is a writer and doula who lives on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe of Treaty 3 in Kenora, Ontario.

Correspondent is longlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award, awarded for a book of poetry by a League member. This remarkably confident debut collection offers three long prose poems, each divided into 19 sections, fusing images of bucolic coastal summers, a father fixed by a television broadcast, and the colours of a Moscow winter with vividly depicted scenes of gunfire, media scrums, and live reporting. In this unusual hybrid of the personal and the historical, Dominque Bernier-Cormier tenders alternating perspectives on what is said, what is seen, and where the silence begins.

Dominique Bernier-Cormier was born in Quebec and spent the summers of his childhood on New Brunswick's Acadian coast. But he grew up in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing, where his father worked as a foreign correspondent for CBC/Radio Canada television.

The shortlists will be announced Tuesday, April 23. The winners will be announced in June and receive a prize of $2,000.

The League of Canadian Poets was founded in 1966 for advancement of poetry in Canada and the promotion of the interests of poets. Over 700 members are professional poets in various stages of their career who actively contribute to poetry in Canada.