About the book
- Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award
- Shortlisted for the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
- Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award
About the author
Carolyn Marie Souaid is a Montreal-based writer, editor and painter. She is the author of nine poetry collections and the novel, Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik, winner of the Silver Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the NYC Independent Publisher Book Awards. She has performed at literary festivals and events in Canada, Europe and the U.S., her work garnering a top prize at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin and appearing on shortlists for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Throughout her career, she has worked extensively to build bridges between linguistic and cultural communities in Quebec, including a decades-long involvement with the Inuit. Souaid's work has appeared in print and online journals, nationally and internationally, and has been featured on CBC-Radio. Her literary papers (1967-2022) are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library of McGill University.
Excerpt
Mont Royal (a mountain with a view)
6
Even in death, he looms
larger than life,
dovetailing
with the sodium clouds
& the gun-slung cold.
Rinsing back down over the city.
She trudges. Vectors, they all trudge
home to their davenports
& dour TVs.
Would she could wield
her ponderous thoughts,
pull souvenir swatches
from the aquarelle sky.
Venus (the heroine)
3
everything points to your
absence:
dimmed tail-lights of cars & outgoing geese
the grim, subtracted leaves
a bristled, Andean chill to the air
you on exotic soil
–I, exiled
in the long, wan shade
of home
metaphors not of sadness, really
but of the enormity
of unneeding you
this late in the afternoon
Rose (a fetus)
3
Beyond the instant, there is history,
loss, rooted in the gene-pool of a city,
rusted into its ancestry.
You smell it in the air.
The elusive Northwest Passage, a scarcity
of tea. Greenish, stegosaural hulks nailed
over the river: the Navigators.
Jacques Cartier, Champlain.
Les filles who set sail, uncanonized.
Oxidizing on infant soil.
This is what lushes life,
fleshes it out.
Each moment, part of a greater genealogy.
Branch after branch twigging backwards
to the ghost nugget.
Gentrify the industrial park, but in its heart
of hearts, a condo is still an abbatoir.
Take a moment like this.
You are alone, driving recklessly.
The radio is on, and you are all ears.
There is talk:
Trudeau has died.
Your sadness, shock shatters the singularity.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, we are two
careening down the highway.
You and I in the same humidity,
at opposite ends of living.
Your solid mind yielding
to the shards: a weak, past-tense
rose minnowing in the morgue.
The crashed histories piling up.
You lurch to a stop, your heart impounded,
the car coughing its way to the side of the road.
You wonder what might have been,
given another moment,
a different set of circumstances.
A softer, leafier stretch.
Hands clasped, communing,
we might have hunkered down
with a cup of chai and a cinnamon bun,
and watched the house where he lay dying,
the interred, half-mast sun
underground.
Reviews
“Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a French composer and pianist known for his eccentricity and the unusual titles he gave his compositions. Carolyn Marie Souaid aptly evokes Satie in the title of her fourth collection, Satie's Sad Piano.
…” >>
“Carolyn Souaid is a thoroughly serious writer: centric, not eccentric, and eager to confront the key issues of Canadian society. Satie's Sad Piano is a civic elegy in the tradition of Dennis Lee, a poem exploring Canada's uncertain destiny. She…” >>
“Taking it to the streets
While poetry and the poetic spirit can spring up and thrive anywhere, it seems that some fields are more fertile than others. We don't mean to boast, but clearly Montreal is one…” >>
PURCHASE FORMAT
PAPERBACK
$14.95
96 pages
ISBN ISBN: 1-897109-01-6
ISBN 13: 978-1897109-01-4
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