Jes Battis wins Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry
We are thrilled to announce that Jes Battis won the Saskatchewan Book Awards’ Poetry Award Honouring Anne Szumigalski for their debut poetry collection, I Hate Parties. The 32nd annual awards were presented at Saskatoon’s TCU Place on May 9.
Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.
“I Hate Parties is one of the most relatable poetry collections I have read in a long time. Clever, thoughtful, heartbreaking and touching, the poems piece together vivid descriptions of nostalgic haunts and pop culture. Poems that transport through space and time, probing the complexities of societal norms that can become a trap to fit into.”
—Daniel Zomparelli, author of Jump Scare and founder of Poetry Is Dead magazine
Jes Battis (they/them) teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They’ve published poems in The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review and Poetry Is Dead, among other literary magazines. They’ve also published creative nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Strange Horizons. They are the author of the Occult Special Investigator series (shortlisted for the Sunburst Award), the Parallel Parks series and, most recently, The Winter Knight with ECW.
The Saskatchewan Book Awards is a program that celebrates Saskatchewan’s diverse literary community. Now in its 32nd year, there are fourteen awards presented to authors and publishers in the province.