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"Intruder, Bardia Sinaee's bold debut collection, explores with vivid and precise language themes of intrusion and encroachment in contemporary life. Touching on such hot-button subjects as migration, xenophobia, urban sprawl, and disease in tones that range from bemused to droll to demagogic, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee's much-anticipated debut collection evolves in three stages. The first section, consisting mostly of plain-spoken poems about city life, is influenced by the poems of James Schuyler and Karen Solie. The second spools out in a sequence of imagistic sixteen-line poems that progress via quiet observation and associative logic, and it takes its cue from works like John Ashbery's Shadow Train and Ben Lerner's The Lichtenberg Figures. The poems in the third section are slower, minimalist, and aphoristic, at times reminiscent of the work and style of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe. This final section also includes a recent sequence of poems, "Half-Life," written during and about the COVID-19 lockdown and referencing the poet's self-isolation in Toronto with imagery that underlines the pandemic's global scope. Throughout the poems, the poet's cancer diagnosis and two and a half years of chemotherapy are not made explicit, but instead provide a background note of vulnerability and anxiety that haunts this timely collection."--
A propos de l'auteur
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the chapbooks
Blue Night Express and
Salamander Festival. His poems have also appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of
Best Canadian Poetry. In 2012 his poem ¿Barnacle Goose Ballad¿ was Reader¿s Choice winner for The Walrus Poetry Prize, and in 2020 he was co-winner of the
Capilano Review¿s Robin Blaser Award. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Guelph University¿s Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Intruder is his first book.
Résumé
Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry
In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through.
Préface
REVIEW COPIES:
- Publishers Weekly
- Booklist
- Kirkus Reviews
