Shortlisted for the 2026 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
Winner of the 2026 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize
Poems that retrace unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the tar sands
Tracing words the way a tracker moves across land, Goose collects hand-copied details from Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region authored by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells. At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Melanie Dennis Unrau’s poems explore extraction and the relationship between humans, non- humans, and the land, resulting in an act of irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism.