Goose

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.