The Nelson Ball Prize: Margaret Christakos wins! and Peter Jaeger's shortlist write-up,

Congratulations to Toronto poet Margaret Christakos, who recently won The Nelson Ball Prize for That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press, 2024)! 2025 judges Bev Daurio and James McDonald included, as you might already know, Peter Jaeger's Selected Memoirs (above/ground press, 2024) on their shortlist, so here's the judge's citations for such (you can see the citations for all five of the shortlist titles, including Christakos', as well as a short interview with Christakos, here):

Selected Memoirs (above/ground press)
by Peter Jaeger

Peter Jaeger is the author of several books and has written on a wide variety of topics, from ecology to John Cage. His chapbook Selected Memoirs addresses six and a half decades of one life, in thirty passages varying in length from twenty-five words to a couple of pages. Some passages cover several years, some only one. Much is missing; most of the life under consideration; yet the book feels complete and open at the same time. Its observations are as much by omission as by what they state; there are great gaps of time and context between some sections, between years, between sentences within entries. The passages and the spaces between them combine to create a perfect broken mashed-together record of existence, implying that much is forgotten.

Jaeger touches on the intellectual, the mundane, sweetness and regret, the greater world, the inner world, worlds imagined. There is a tipping between the real, and memory. Jaeger touches on horror (2001), a puzzling comment by a colleague (1997-98), unique experiences in the real world, "Scuba drift in the Red Sea" (2002-03) and times of want: "That winter Frank and I wore our heavy coats inside the house and clutched empty whiskey bottles filled with hot water to keep our hands warm." (1983).

Listing topics and descrying polarities and their subtle tensions, however, does not do the book justice, because so much of its joy is contained in its delicate, startling details and striking, unexpected shifts. The entry for 1966 reads: "Meditating in Bellwoods Park on a sunny afternoon in Toronto, I saw myself and the world as a continuous field of subatomic particles. I still remained deeply interested in the alphabet."

Although written in seemingly straightforward prose, Selected Memoirs is replete with moments of incredible writing, and a participatory poetics, where gaps and leaps ask the reader to consider all that is not there and what is hidden. Jaeger creates a small world of serenity, by turns warm, winsome, vulnerable, and quietly profound.