Finalist for the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize

Nought, the new poetry collection by Governor General's Literary Award finalist Julie Joosten, explores the intersections of body, identity, and love in poems that grapple with mysteries of neurology and metaphysics. Here the materiality of the body and experience have transformed into a language, a thought that resides in and between bodies. Throughout, Joosten masterfully engages with form and rhythm, crafting work that is intimage and perceptive, pulsing with life.

Julie Joosten is originally from Georgia but now lives in Toronto. She holds an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers Program and a PhD from Cornell University. Her poems and reviews can be read in Jacket 2, Tarpaulin Sky, the Malahat Review and The Fiddlehead. She recently guest edited an issue of BafterC, a journal of contemporary poetry. Light Light is her first book.

Julie Joosten's profile page

• Short-listed, Nelson Ball Prize

"This tenderly porous poetry is a philosophical excursion into ancient and still-vast questions: how are dogs, grasses, crickets, anemones always becoming thought? Joosten composes a phenomenology of care, brings me to the sill of an attentive stillness where I am free to not be myself. It's a little frightening and a little exhilarating. But in these poems I am welcomed and supported by the shared minutiae of perceiving." —Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

"Joosten’s voice recollects Lisa Robertson’s: a sharply witty inner monologue or conversation with various psychic selves; and restless play with genre and form." —Event Magazine

"The poems that make up Nought are crafted into a single, delicate lyric thread; a suite of suites, held together as a long poem on physicality, connection and attachment." —rob mclennan