Hailing from Vancouver, Raoul Fernandes won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2016 for his debut collection of poems, Transmitter and Receiver. His early childhood was spent in Dubai, U.A.E., which he has spoken of being influential through the “sparseness of the desert landscape, the tension between the many groups of people there. The muezzin chanting in the evenings.” He moved to Tsawwassen in 1993, where he was led to poetry through music. His poem, “When the Teeth of the Gears Meet” confronts the mechanistic nature of our lives and interactions, and a desire to escape.