Winner 2023 Alcuin Award

Longlisted 2024 Raymond Souster and Gerald Lampert Awards

Poems for and about the incarcerated.

Moving from riots to mall parkades to church, the poems in Bradley Peters' debut Sonnets from a Cell mix inmate speech, prison psychology, skateboard slang and contemporary lyricism in a way that is tough and tender, that is accountable both to Peters' own days "caught between the past and nothing" and to the structures that sentence so many "to lose." Written behind doors our culture too often keeps closed, this is poetry reaching out for moments of longing, wild joy and grace.

Drawing on his own experiences as a teenager and young adult in and out of the Canadian prison system, Peters has written both a personal reckoning and a damning and eloquent account of our violence- and enforcement-obsessed capitalist and patriarchal cultures.

Bradley Peters is a poet, actor, and carpenter from Mission, BC. His poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines, has been shortlisted for The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Award, has twice been the runner-up for Subterrain's Lush Triumphant Award, and in 2019 placed first in Grain Magazine's Short Grain contest. Sonnets from a Cell is his first book.

Bradley Peters' profile page

• Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
• Winner, Alcuin Award
• Winner, Raymond Souster Award
• Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
• Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

"I'm struck by how artful a made thing this book is, a balance of real humility and expertise. An incredible feat." — Sheryda Warrener, author of Test Piece and Floating Is Everything