Cecily Nicholson Wins $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry

Nicholson’s book of poems, Wayside Sang, explores displacement, identity and North American roadways through the lens of Black diaspora communities.

“A poetic account of economy travel”

The jury described Wayside Sang as a “hypnotic suite of long poems,” and said that in it, Nicholson offers “glimpses and echoes of the Canadian landscape as she explores ideas of borders, identity, industry and travel.” The book’s publisher, Talonbooks, calls Wayside Sang a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, and says it “concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement.”

Poems explore issues of identity

Nicholson says in writing the book, she was setting out on a personal journey and exploring her ancestry, particularly the history of her birth father, whom she never knew. She saw parallels between this search and broader narratives of the displacement and movement of diaspora Black communities relative to the Windsor-Detroit border, which also led her to focus on the automobile, roadway and related industries. “I was also thinking about climate and the broader geological time of the land and of the water,” she told CBC in an interview.