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Shortlisted, 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
Shortlisted, 2026 Trillium Book Away for Poetry
Longlisted, 2025 Toronto Book Awards
Shortlisted, 2026 League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award
A CBC Best Book of 2025
Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.
What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.
Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.
“Farah Ghafoor’s highly-anticipated debut is as expansive and epic as it is exacting … Shadow Price is a stalwart reminder of how much we have already lost to capitalism, how much we still might lose, and how we might come to terms with this disrepair.”– Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, the Sun
“With ardor and a lustrous fury, Farah Ghafoor emboldens with poems that resound of a planet in crisis … This is a book we need now more than ever given the severe and precarious state of our entire existence and all that we touch, eat, breathe, and leave behind." —Mai Der Vang, author of Primordial
"If we are the last poets, may this collection inspire us to truly value the pricelessness of our wounded and wondrous planet." — Craig Santos Perez, author of Cal This Mutiny
“[Ghafoor] deconstructs and reassembles our world into a sincere but uncanny and urgent stream of thoughts and images, often playful, absurd, sarcastic, and funny … A tour de force.” —Andri Magnason, author of Time and Water
“A groundbreaking take on ecopoetry … [Shadow Price manages to] show us a world that is beautiful and, above all, inherently valuable.” — Room
“Urgent debut.” — Winnipeg Free Press
“Ghafoor’s words hold up a mirror to society, asking whether we still have time or if it is already too late … Gut-wrenching. — Quebec Library Association
“This collection serves as a stark reminder of how much we’ve already lost to capitalism and a warning of how much we still have to lose. Wrapped in lyrics that are lively and irresistible, this is a call to action.” — Spring Magazine