Dodds's first collection of poems, Crabwise to the Hounds, won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry in 2009 and was nominated for both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Gerald Lampert Award. Dodds is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award for poetry. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Hungarian, Finnish, French, Swedish, Icelandic and German. It has animals in it, of course.