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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781487008727 |
---|---|
Publisher: | House of Anansi Press Inc |
Publication date: | 04/06/2021 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 96 |
File size: | 565 KB |
About the Author
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 MFA in Poetry from Guelph University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Intruder is his first book.
Table of Contents
Blood Work 1
1
Snow Day 5
Nose Job 6
After Schuyler 8
Ornamental Kale 9
Workshop 10
Return to St. Joseph's 11
The Deceased 12
Christmas Cactus 14
Band-Aid 15
High Park 16
Poem 18
Harbour Song 19
The New House 20
Ample Habitat 21
Intruder 23
Shomal 24
Barnacle Geese 25
Aberration 26
Although I Am Always Talking 27
Flyover 28
Residual 30
Escape from Statuary 32
The Scorpion and the Frog 33
Twelve Storeys 34
Transfusion 40
2
Deposition 43
October Idea 44
Weed Queen 45
Dawn of the Living 46
Phosphorus and Nitrogen 47
Shahrzad and the King 48
Why We Eat Figs 49
An Example 50
Plain Clothes 51
Nothing Is Forbidden 52
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor 53
Staycation 54
Regarding Certain of My Poems 55
Study of Mr. Mohan 56
Salamander Festival 57
Aubade 58
The End of Men 59
Deep Intent 60
Song for the Song of the Hydroörganon 61
3
Clearing 65
Hypothesis 67
Stichomancy 68
Ziziphora 70
Buckets 71
Floater 72
Scale 74
Induction 75
Triptych 77
Bleeding 79
Intensification 80
Cadillac 81
Panelists 83
Ending 85
Half-Life 87
Ozu 95
Poem 97
Two Windows 101
Notes 103
Acknowledgements 105
What People are Saying About This
Attuned to discourses regarding the spectral nature of just about everything,’ Bardia Sinaee illuminates our modern gothic in his debut collection, Intruder. Haunted by the political history of the Middle East, by the precarity of the contemporary Canadian metropole, and by the spectre of death — ‘That slow ghost / pushing a drip stand / down the corridor / That’s me’ — this existential intruder questions just about everything, including himself. ‘Maybe you ask too many questions,’ writes the poet, ‘Maybe it’s time to let the wind have your clothes.’ Wondrously, Sinaee’s lyric interrogations hold us captive even as they invite us to imagine our escape.
PRAISE FOR BARDIA SINAEE AND INTRUDER
“‘Attuned to discourses regarding the spectral nature of just about everything,’ Bardia Sinaee illuminates our modern gothic in his debut collection, Intruder. Haunted by the political history of the Middle East, by the precarity of the contemporary Canadian metropole, and by the spectre of death — ‘That slow ghost / pushing a drip stand / down the corridor / That’s me’ — this existential intruder questions just about everything, including himself. ‘Maybe you ask too many questions,’ writes the poet, ‘Maybe it’s time to let the wind have your clothes.’ Wondrously, Sinaee’s lyric interrogations hold us captive even as they invite us to imagine our escape.” — Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit
“Intruder is a book that wants to ‘welcome the world, all of it’ — birdsong and myth, magnolias and the city, along with the ‘slow ghost / pushing a drip stand /down the corridor.’ We sit with the poet in a room with two windows; we sit with the patient as a central venous catheter is inserted into his chest. Sinaee writes that ‘all poems are true/even ugly ones.’ But there are no ugly poems in this surprising, moving, and darkly humorous debut collection — only true ones.” — Jen Currin, author of School
PRAISE FOR BARDIA SINAEE
“The question of a full-length book from Sinaee isn’t a matter of if, but when, and there is such a care and a patience in his poems that suggests, perhaps, he simply isn’t in a hurry, which might, for now, be the smartest thing he can do.” — Open Book
“Several peers: Aisha Sasha John, Phoebe Wang, Vladimir Lucien, Safiya Sinclair, Danez Smith, Solmaz Sharif, Juliane Okot Bitek, Bardia Sinaee, Ishion Hutchinson, and others. These poets are all holding dynamic spaces within their own rattled courtships with language and feeling and thought in poetry.” — Canisia Lubrin, What the Poets Are Doing
“Sinaee’s poetry always strikes just the right note between sarcasm and wisdom. Sincerity has become a dirty word, a saccharine insult, but when done right, like in the poetry of Bardia Sinaee, these poems rise above any cheap sentiment and truthfully, crisply, clearly, cut to the heart of matters.” — Michael Dennis
Intruder is a book that wants to ‘welcome the world, all of it’ — birdsong and myth, magnolias and the city, along with the ‘slow ghost / pushing a drip stand /down the corridor.’ We sit with the poet in a room with two windows; we sit with the patient as a central venous catheter is inserted into his chest. Sinaee writes that ‘all poems are true/even ugly ones.’ But there are no ugly poems in this surprising, moving, and darkly humorous debut collection — only true ones.