He has attended artists’ residencies in Finland, Italy, Switzerland and Taiwan, and among the awards his work has won is the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported a research stint to India and East Africa. When his first collection of poetry, Reticent Bodies, was published, one critic assessed the book’s impact: “Reticent Bodies is that rare book that has the power to be a lynchpin, a hinge in the history of Canadian poetry.”