GREAT SILENT BALLAD
Winner of the 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize
Great Silent Ballad, lyric poet A.F. Moritz’s twenty-second volume of poetry, in visionary terms, forwards the assertion that poetry, a primordial reality, is in the current moment both the equal of, and the antidote to, the rest of present-day civilization and its suicidal nature.
The Waste Land Project Chapbook
Listen to “Finding A Voice” on CRFC 101.9 FM
Podcast Appearance with Jordan Weir
Best Canadian Poetry 2026
Join me for Poets@Artfest Kingston
“Art and Artists” reading at the Free Times Café
The Waste Land Project
Vallum Chapbook Series, No. 40, 2025
This chapbook brings together twelve poems responding to the subject of war, with emphasis on war in Ukraine. Created for The Waste Land Project, an initiative by Theater of War in collaboration with the Toronto International Festival of Authors (Canada), Bristol Ideas (UK), and Aké Arts and Books Festival (Nigeria), the poems were inspired by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on its 100th anniversary.
AS FAR AS YOU KNOW
As Far As You Know, acclaimed poet A. F. Moritz’s twentieth collection of poems, begins with two sections entitled “Terrorism” and “Poetry.” The book unfolds in six movements, yet it revolves around and agonizes over the struggle between these two catalyzing concepts, in all the forms they might take, eventually arguing they are the unavoidable conditions and quandary of human life.
ABOUT
A. F. Moritz has written more than twenty books of poetry. His most recent collections are The Sparrow (2018), As Far As You Know (2020), and Great Silent Ballad (2024). He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His collection, The Sentinel, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year. And Great Silent Ballad received the 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. He lives in Toronto, where he recently served as the city’s sixth Poet Laureate.
POET LAUREATE
AUDIO/VIDEO
POETRY COLLECTIONS
CHAPBOOKS & BROADSIDES
TRANSLATION
MAGAZINES
NON-FICTION
ANTHOLOGIES & EDITIONS
INTERVIEWS
