I HATE PARTIES by Jes Battis is Longlisted for the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award!
The League of Canadian Poets has released the 2025 longlist for the 2025 LCP Book Awards, and Nightwood Editions is proud to congratulate Jes Battis, whose poetry collection, I Hate Parties, was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. The award recognizes a debut book of poetry and is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers.
The LCP Book Awards include the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award. Shortlists will be announced on May 7, 2025, followed by an online reading on May 13 to celebrate the finalists. Winners, each receiving a $2,000 prize, will be announced on May 14, 2025.
Originally from Chilliwack, BC, Jes Battis teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. Their work has been shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, in addition to being included in the Canada Reads competition. 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.
"It's an honour to be recognized within a group of so many talented poets," said Battis. "I'm so happy that my rambling little poems about being awkward and odd-brained and queer have found an audience."
The poems in I Hate Parties "dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces," offering a raw, B-side perspective on growing up queer, autistic, and nonbinary. 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.
Praise for I Hate Parties
In I Hate Parties by Jes Battis, the speaker shines an important spotlight on issues of neurodiversity and queer acceptance made all the more awkward, more poignant, by the personal universe Battis constructs from adolescent years growing up in small town Canada, but it is Battis’s play with language, their range of allusions and bright-burning lyricism, that makes the strength of their poetry shine through. Like a television show-runner, Battis leads their reader through the awkwardness of queer first-crushes, small town hockey nights, the suppression of autistic meltdowns at the grocery store, and after every episode described, every poem read, I find myself thinking of “the best and worst parties” of my own life, which is what good poetry is supposed to do. ~ Chris Banks, The Woodlot
The inclusion of pop culture and literary references ranging from the songs of Tori Amos to time machines provides a point of connection to a broader society, reminding us that there is more to us than our sexual identities, though some people seem to want to judge us based on that sole aspect. Resonant, reflective, entertaining, and insightful, I found I Hate Parties to be a moving and entertaining read. ~ Lisa Timpf, Plenitude Magazine
One of the most endearingly Millennial things I have ever read is “We stage a scene from Sailor Moon / where Tuxedo Mask is stalked / by a gay alien.” I Hate Parties combines weighty topics and relatable anecdotes to create a collection that is at once complicated, hilarious, sombre, and exuberant.~ Rosalie Morris, Room magazine