Sweetness | by Anna Swanson

Anna Swanson has made the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize shortlist for Sweetness | .

She will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and her work has been published on CBC Books.

The winner of the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize will be announced Nov. 23. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a writing residency and have their work published on CBC Books.

Anna Swansonis a queer Jewish writer and librarian based in St. John's and currently completing an MFA at the University of Guelph. Her writing is interested in themes of chronic illness, concussion, embodiment, identity, queerness, Jewish ritual, intergenerational traumaand survival joy. Her first book of poetry,The Nights Also,won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her second book,The Garbage Poems, is forthcoming from Brick Books in 2025. Swanson was previouslyshortlisted for the 2015 CBC Poetry Prizefor her entryThe Garbage Poems. She works with Riddle Fence as a poetry editorand loves swimming outdoors in all seasons.

Swanson told CBC Books thatSweetness | is part of a larger project she is working on: "This is part of a project about Jewish food rituals, their relationship to intergenerational trauma, and the ways in which they can also be a form of collective resilience. The archetypal food ritual for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, is to dip apples in honey to wish each other a sweet new year. I wrote this poem on the first night of Rosh Hashanah last year, imagining a year filled with sweetness for myself and the world around me.

"As part of the larger writing project, I knew I would be writing about difficult family history, intergenerational trauma in Jewish communities, and the ways Jewish trauma has been weaponized against other groups. I wanted to look at how practices of sweetness, pleasure, food, and embodied connection are also passed intergenerationally. I wanted to remind myself that traditions which might seem frivolous or indulgent can actually be tools of collective survival and transformation. I haven't always been comfortable entering Jewish spaces, for a variety of reasons, so I wanted to write a kind of Jewishness that I felt at home in. I am inspired by Jewish writers like Aurora Levins Morales and Elliot Kukla and Dori Midnight (and many others) who reimagine Jewish rituals and liturgy in ways that are transformative, inclusive, and deeply rooted in collective liberation. I don't think I knew I was writing a spell until after the poem was finished, but that is very much in line with how I think poetry can function in the world as a kind of magic."

You can read Sweetness | below.

WARNING: This poem contains strong language and is sexually explicit in nature.

First night of Rosh Hashanah,
always a new moon. Alone in a rented cabin

I wrap an old towel around me,
turn off lights, carry a plastic dish of honey

and apple slices to the hot tub. No large light
to dull the dark open doors of the sky.

I lie back naked in warm water
under the quiet libido of stars, and the world and I

have some words about sweetness
for the coming year. Jupiter rises closer

than I've ever seentwinkling,
I can't think of another word, little rays

like a star in a storybook. There will be sex, yes,
I say, dipping a finger into 55,000 miles

of pollen gathering, sex dripping, no, sweeter,
sweet as the edge of the paring knife

that cleaves open the apple so the wet cells of it
might dip, unskinned, into honey, so that we might meet it

with tongues first, before teeth. Maybe
this year someone will pat my head,

tell me how good I've been in the filthy privacy
of our own sweet world. Friends will fall easily

into my life, like in our twenties when we met
and sparked with such ease it was unremarkable,

except let me delight in new friendships at forty-eight,
no less like lightning but encumbered with toddlers,

logistics, work schedules, lining up our brief
windows and understanding, finally, how sweet,

how remarkable, to make a new friend.
Sweetness of being together in the hundreds,

the thousands, for a new world whose seed
is us singing it in the streets, solidarity as a spell

we say out loud with our bodiesProtect Trans Kids!
Water is life! Not gay as in happy but queer

as in Free Palestine! Maybe I will watch children I love
learn to ride bicycles and program small plastic robots.

Keira will read me her new favourite book
while her parents cook dinner in the next room.

Gluten-free mushroom cashew pie, confit tomatoes.
Another fifteen-pound brisket slow-cooked

six hours with the twelve cups of onions
in my mother's recipe, a backyard of people to eat it

and almost enough forks. Picnics, the sweetness
of plaid blankets spread with snacks,

drinking hot tea in the snow, feeding each other
with our gardens and our fingers, which,

of course, is another way of saying, yes
there will be sex: the kind that is fingers, fingers,

fingers. And love, new spark and flush
blooming out from under where I had not thought

to look. A cool pond at sunrise, that perfect
shade of lipstick that makes my lips look

like my lips only now my lips are ripe fruit
and a sparkling stranger walks, unhurried,

into the queer orchard of my life.
Sweetness of secret beaches and outdoor naps

and emails that say pleased to inform
to everything we have so ardently asked.

Of leaning into a quiet Saturday,
a heavy cotton quilt, of giving a body

what it needs and for as long as it wants.
Sweetness of deep sleep, of loving a body

when it is accomplishing nothing.
Of this recliner with a view of the ocean,

tea and two squares of chocolate
next to that new novel by that favourite author

and hoping, deliciously, it's a good one.
Of this new year, the doors just cracking, and here

we are, about to step in, and we hopedeliciously
it's a good one, a sweet one, a drenched,

a dancing, a diving one, where we dip a finger
into the secret centre of our possible lives,

taste our way into the opening year,
tongues first, then teeth.

Read the other finalists

• restitution OR Nanabush speaks to the settlersby Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Neyaashiinigmiing, Ont.)
• Variations on Genesisby Jillian Clasky (Ottawa)
• I Can Communicate If Communication Is Another Form of Sinkingby Jaclyn Desforges (Hamilton, Ont.)
• lotus flower blooming into breastsby Kyo Lee (Waterloo, Ont.)

About the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize

The winner of the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a writing residency and have their work published on CBC Books. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024CBC Nonfiction Prize opens in January and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize opens in April.The 2025CBC Short Story Prizewill open in September.