pickBeautiful, eloquent book by one of Canada‘s best-known Black and queer poets, intertwining four stories of diverse people in Toronto who are all connected in some way. Newcomers, struggling drug addicts, women seeking new relationships, parents and siblings, piano teachers and students, and hairdressers all make their way into this book, finding how to live with themselves and each other. Toronto is vividly portrayed as well.
Right now, she is probably an odd-looking woman in the coffee shop. She looks around, and laughs again. Everybody in the Tim Horton‘s is odd-looking, except those who have someone sitting across from them talking. Companionship makes you look sane. There could be two perfectly crazy people sitting together, but that act of social mingling legitimizes their sanity. Ridiculous, June thinks. This is another act of cultivation.
June disliked starlings. They sought each day to displace the sparrows. She did not like their twitter or their sharp yellow predatory beaks. And she had no appreciation for their multicolored, glistening feathers, at once green, gold, red, blue, and black. She understood that they lived in a communal nest that could take over an attic. This would otherwise have been admirable as socialism but she hated the aggression of starlings.
Mercede‘s love was exhausting because it needed love back constantly. Leah and Jermaine were children and didn‘t always know how to love back. They simply knew how to love, and at times they wanted to run or play, and have love waiting for them when they returned. Mercede‘s love was a burning, wanting love. Mercedes‘ love could not hold out against the panic of never being loved enough.
The best way of looking at a sunset in the city is in the mirrors of a car. If you ever travel east along Dupont Street at that time look back: you may see something breathtaking. It‘s perhaps because this street is so ugly: car wrecking shops, taxi dispatch sheds, rooming houses, hardware stores, desolate all-night diners and front yards eaten up by 100-winter salt, it is because of all this that a sunset is in the perfect location here: needed.
Dionne Brand is giving a talk at the University of Alberta tonight: An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading. I‘m psyched!
#Brilliant #LGBTQ #CanadianAuthor
pickThese are four great books by Canadian queer POC (people of colour) authors that I've enjoyed recently! I recommend them all! #booktober #diversereads #queerbooks
Love Enough: A Novel | 
