Congratulations to Chimwemwe Undi
Books | Winner of the 2024 Governor General's Award
Congrats to all the winners and finalists!
It was an honour to serve on the peer assessment committee for poetry with Heather Nolan and
Big congrats to Chimwemwe Undi whose beautiful book Scientific Marvel (House of Anansi Press) won the GG Award for Poetry.
“Balanced between lyricism and experimentation, Scientific Marvel takes an incisive and wide-ranging approach to observation, navigating modern concerns with wit, beauty and sensitivity. Crafting poetry from sources as disparate as case law and interpersonal relationships, Undi explores facets of belonging and place with rigour and a refreshingly bold voice.”
—Peer assessment committee: Kathryn Mockler, Heather Nolan and Tolu Oloruntoba
Scientific Marvel by Chimwemwe Undi House of Anansi Press
Marked by rhythmic drive, humour, and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Firmly grounded in the local, the arresting poems in Chimwemwe Undi’s debut collection, Scientific Marvel, are preoccupied with Winnipeg in the way a Winnipegger is preoccupied with Winnipeg, the way a poet might be preoccupied with herself: through history and immigration; race and gender; anxieties and observation. Marked by rhythmic drive, humour and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the west. Taking its title from a beauty school in downtown Winnipeg that closed in 2017 after nearly 100 years of operation, Scientific Marvel approaches the prairies from the point of view of a person who is often erased from the prairies’ idea of itself. “I mean my country the way / my country means my country / and what else is there to say? / I am bad and brown / and trying. Nothing here / belongs to me or could / or ever will.”
This is poetry that touches on challenging topics—from queerness and colonialism to racism, climate rage, and decolonization, while never straying far from specific lived experience, the so-called ‘smaller’ questions: about self, art, dance parties and pop culture, relationships and love.
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