May 27, 2009. The Trillium Book Awards shortlists were announced in a release on Wednesday morning. Coach House Books author Jeramy Dodds (Crabwise to the Hounds, Fall 2008) and Pedlar Press author Joanne Page (Watermarks, Fall 2008) have both been nominated for the English Poetry Award, which comes with a $10,000 prize. The winners will be announced on June 16, 2009.

Crabwise to the Hounds is a debut collection of poetry from Dodds, winner of the CBC Literary Award and the Bronwen Wallace Award.. Humorous at times, yet always handled with consummate craft, these poems invoke historical figures like Hiram Bingham and Ho Chi Minh even as they traverse a poetic landscape that includes telephone-game-style translations, interpretive-dance poems on historic paintings and carnivalesque jaunts into a natural world overrun with mules, Alsatians, lions and motorcycle-sized deer.

Watermarks shows poet Page "at the height of her powers," writes poet Molly Peacock. "She uses her characteristic wit, insouciant intelligence and wide-roaming interests to make worlds we can enter with delight. 'From the Hitherto Unpublished Journals of Miss Byrdie T., Inveterate Traveller and Champion of Lost Causes' is a poem title that demonstrates the sheer fun of her ironic inversions of literary tradition. Page speaks directly and unabashedly to her readers, creating a meeting of the minds on the marvellous occasion of each of the poems in Watermarks."

LPG publisher Snare Books' poet Pasha Malla (All Our Grandfathers are Ghosts, Fall 2008), has also been shortlisted for his fiction, The Withdrawal Method.

The Trillium Book Awards, founded by the Ontario government, is the province's leading literature award, honouring works by Ontario authors. Past winners include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, and Anne Michaels.