Finalist, 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2025 DC Reid Poetry Book Prize
Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, Midway is an exploration of grief in all its manifestations.
“I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch,” writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London’s Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak—both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.
Finalist, 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2025 DC Reid Poetry Book Prize
Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, Midway is an exploration of grief in all its manifestations.
“I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch,” writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London’s Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak—both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 2, 2024 |
| Specifications | 88 pages | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
|
Supporting Resources
(select item to download) |
Excerpt |
| Written By |
KAYLA CZAGA is the author of two previous poetry collections—For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019). Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, the Songhees nd Esquimalt nations. |
| Written By |
|
KAYLA CZAGA is the author of two previous poetry collections—For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019). Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, the Songhees nd Esquimalt nations. |
Short-listed, BC and Yukon Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 2025
Short-listed, Victoria Book Prized DC Reid Poetry Prize, 2025
Winner, SCWES Poetry Book Award for BC Authors, 2024
Runner-up, Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry, 2025
"Midway is funny, genuine, and well written. Czaga offers a fitting and vulnerable elegy for her parents and a harrowing meditation on her life in the aftermath." — Literary Review of Canada
“A book to expand your mind.” — Literary Hub
"Czaga blends grief’s range of emotions masterfully in Midway." — British Columbia Review
“Powerful and controlled and revelatory … [Midway] is brilliant, and inspiring, and should be read by everyone who cares deeply, and passionately, not just about poetry, but the important things poetry tries to make us see: like grief, and our inability to contain it.” — The Woodlot
“[Midway] solidifies Czaga’s reputation as one of Canada’s most promising young poets.” — Portal Magazine
“The poems [in Midway] are evocative in their clarity and their truthfulness: rueful, reflective, funny, angry, despairing, accepting.” — The Miramichi Reader
"A lyric force, taking on grief in molecular detail. I love these poems." — Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife
”“Then I got into the poem– / it doesn’t matter which poem– / and let it take me / wherever it was going,” Kayla Czaga concludes in her powerful elegy, “Dad Poem,” and I found myself making this allowance as well throughout the brilliant lyric poems of Midway ... Czaga’s Midway offers a glimpse at how, through the paired problems of the presence of parents and their absences, one's imagination and self might still grow." — Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City