BC Book Prize, Poetry: Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (Winner)

In the North Arm of British Columbia’s Fraser River lies an uninhabited island. Guarded by water from the city of New Westminster’s bustling industrial and shipping district, Poplar Island is lush and unspoken, but storied. It is the traditional territory of the Qayqayt peoples. Made into property, a parcel of land belonging to the “New Westminster and Brownsville Indians,” it is the location of one of British Columbia’s first Indian Reserves.
Polar Island is a landscape marred by colonization, where Indigenous smallpox victims from the south coast were forced into quarantine, substandard care, and burial. Once their peoples were decimated and the land taken, wrangled and exchanged between levels of government the trees were clear-cut for industry, including shipbuilding during the First World War and booming anchorage for local sawmills. From the Poplars is the poetic outcome of archival research and of keeping an ear to the ground – of listening to the stories of an earth scoured by colonization, inequality, and extraction. It is a meditation on an unmarked, twenty-seven and a half acres of land held as government property: a monument to colonial plunder on the waterfront of a city built upon erasures.
From an emplaced poet and resident of New Westminster, this text contributes to present narratives on decolonization. It is an honouring of river and riparian density, and a witness to resilience. It tempers a silence that inevitably will be heard.

parcel bought and sold as the record shows stolen
quarantine and bury there the government
not taking graves into account
warships were built view down a launch ramp

About the Author

Cecily Nicholson is the author of five books, including *From the Poplars*, recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and *Wayside Sang*, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her collaborative practice spans municipal, artist-run centres, and community-based arts organizing, education, and advocacy. She is an assistant professor at the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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