New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
Inspired by the Rocky Mountains, 'Land of the Sky', the last poem in this collection, is a means of using detail from various distances to reflect on the socio-political and the human that is all around us. At the essence of all the poems in the collection: to explore the land through the distance of the sky and understand that which seems so grounded as-- the sky-- full of metaphor and near-unfathomable reflexes of histories. This collection is also a continuation of one of the projects of the previous poetry collection, Letter Out: Letter In defining and redefining love as an alternative to solidarity, with the added twist of drawing alternatives to diversity and democracy from the multiplicity of nature.
Contributor Notes
Salimah Valiani is a poet, an activist and a researcher. She is the author of two collections of poetry-- breathing for breadth (2005) and Letter Out: Letter In (2009). An Associate Researcher with the Centre for the Study of Learning, Social Economy and Work at the University of Toronto, she is also the author of Rethinking Unequal Exchange: The Global Integration of Nursing Labour Markets (2012). In June 2012, she was awarded the Feminist Economics Rhonda Williams Prize, an award recognizing feminist scholarship and activism in the spirit of the African American economist and activist, Rhonda Williams. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a number of Canadian journals and anthologies.
Editorial Review
"Land of the Sky delivers poetry that is moving, transporting, and transcendent. A citizen of the globe, Salimah Valiani has no time for the pedestrian and no room for the commonplace. She recognizes that "things are similar and different simultaneously": "What's wrong with choosing the strange?" In Land of the Sky, Valiani connects Canada, Tanzania, and Uganda; Ismaili, Ishnashari, and Buddhist; Anishnabek Cree, Chinese, and Luganda; Chez Rodin and Plante Bath; snow and savannah; astronomy that's based on criminal justice forensics. For Valiani, "The first crime is alienation," and so she savours the world-- exotic menus and mountain gorillas, public transit workers and women dancers-- and each moment's "eminence / decadence." This book is the result of the poet's "fragmenting my life / into more new places." Why? "How many times can a heart be broken?" The resolve? "it takes pain / to feel free."
-- George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary (Canadian) Poet Laureate (2016-2018)
