The Alphabet of Aliens (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781774152010)

The dream-like, eerily atmospheric prose poems in this collection interrogate margins and melt points of migrancy. Intensely personal, it is at once an ambitious autobiography and a dream book, a diary and a field guide. Here, the hybridity of the form serves both as a device of subversion and as an ocular pointing at space and stars, forests and rivers, rupture and belonging. Here wounds multiply in a potato. The soul can be photographed. A mirror hides in a discarded baguette. A phantom-like empty coat in Bardo becomes a bloated pumpkin. The mood is playful, the tone deliberately whimsical giving voice to discourses on passage, arrival and rootlessness of migrant diasporas. Regarding migrancy as an act of self-preservation, disavowing discourses of deservingness and viewing migrants (in the context of Robert Bly's "Stealing Sugar from The Castle") as one encompassing class of "sugar-seeking" ants, these poems create constantly shifting rooms for the coexistence of contradictions. The funny, enchanting, fantastical poems capture the life of ants, the art of tea, the virtue of fish, Greater Toronto at the turn of the century, the terrors of personal and collective histories and a mind dealing with the sentence of place here and elsewhere.