The peer assessment committee, Mary Dalton, Moez Surani, and Gillian Sze, say:

"Xanax Cowboy takes us on a grim and tender ride, exploring a journey through mental illness and addiction. Self-reflexive and contemporary in phrasing and sensibility, the book pairs, like the title itself, a dark coping mechanism of life with the bittersweet harrows of self-performance. Dazzling in its play with form, the book has an utterly original voice, hard-hitting, mordantly ironic, unsparing in its gaze on the self."

Hannah Green is a writer and poetry editor at CV2. Her work has appeared in journals including The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine and Poetry Is Dead. Green holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Winnipeg and a master’s degree in English from Concordia University. She was a poetry finalist for the 2021 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

_____

Imagine you could spend a day with any author, living or dead. Who would you choose, what would you do, and what would you learn?

I have genuinely spent time trying to think of an answer to this but I can’t think of anyone because it would be cruel to summon the dead and I’m too anxious to summon the living.

What advice would you give your ten-year-old self about the future?

Don’t do drugs.

Xanax Cowboy is your much-celebrated debut work of poetry. How does it feel to be recognized by your peers with the Governor General’s Award at this point in your career?

Amazing!!! :)

In an alternate version of the world, who would you be if you weren’t a poet?

Alternate version of the world i.e., alternate universe i.e., man in the A&W commercials.

What was the last book by a Canadian author that changed you in some way?

The All + Flesh, by Brandi Bird.

**

Excerpt from Xanax Cowboy

I will kiss anybody who tells me they like my cowboy boots.

In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje writes
"In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women
and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard."

I am not afraid to die. I want you to be happy for me.
I pace the aisles at Shoppers Drug Mart but there is no card for this occasion.

How like the poet. To rewrite its own tragedy into a comedy.

What is a joke but trauma bleeding from the back, stabbed with an exclamation mark?

At a party, I ask a stranger if he will come outside with me
for a cigarette. I don’t smoke but I’ll keep you company he says. I sigh.
It’s not me that needs the company, it's the misery.

When I was 10 years old I took three Kokanees and drank them in the back yard.

I did not like the taste but I persevered with my prepubescent lagers in the moonlight.

Cowboys are to liquor as Judith Butler is to gender. I’m talking household names.

Why a cowboy? The stranger asks. Because their drunkenness is close to godliness.
What girl doesn’t want to be admired for the halo of the toilet bowl around her head?

Cowboys don’t need to learn to love themselves. To come home to themselves.
Cowboys spit on self-help books and curse em like the day they were born.

The badassery of masculinity is well-established in the literary Wild West.
Forgive me, but I am too tired to subvert a genre. I am not the cowgirl for the job.

Why a cowboy? He asks again. I am sick of repeating myself.  
I’m a fucking cowboy because I said so. There is no Gender Trouble here.

I am not afraid to die but I do not want to be a suicide in Ondaatje’s graveyard.

We believe cowboys. They don’t need to explain themselves
over and over again. A cowboy goes to the doctor with a bullet hole,
not a list of symptoms with no exit wound!