Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk's poetry debut, addresses a harrowing subject: the loss of the poet's mother to addiction. Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together. Poem after poem attempts to wring clarity from memories ripe with trauma and love, as Boychuk questions whether it is possible for a child to ever extricate herself from an abusive parent-to become, as it were, a living "antonym" of a painful family legacy. A booklength loss-lyric of vivid beauty, Antonyms for Daughter is a singular example of grief transformed into art.

Jenny Boychuk was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Walrus, CBC Books, Best New Poets 2016, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead,, Grain, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, among other publications. In 2018, she won the Copper Nickel Editors' Prize in Poetry. She is also the winner of the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

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"Quietly, in contemplation or more harrowing emotional drives,
Boychuk's poems unravel the weight of a complicated relationship
spanning their entwined lifetimes to expose the tendrils netted
between a child and parent and the impossible-seeming task of
disentangling oneself in the face of trauma and grief." - Montreal Review of Books