Recent Poetry from TSAR Publicatio​ns

View all titles at www.tsarbooks.com

Subversive Sonnets
Pamela Mordecai

These “subversive sonnets” overhaul the traditional sonnet form to address a range of subjects, from the tenderness of love to the terror of rape, punishment, torture, and murder. Mordecai has an unfailing ear for voices, for the music that sings and laughs and laments the stories of family, clan, and tribe, thus celebrating life in all its aspects. This is Pamela Mordecai’s fifth collection of poetry.

“Like Pamela Mordecai’s other work, Subversive Sonnets is clever, witty, insightful and linguistically acrobatic. Never one to shy away from difficult themes, Mordecai employs the sonnet form to sing more than ‘little songs’. There is organ music here too as thematically she moves between the bottomless deeps and praise of heaven’s wonders. A courageous, affirmative, and – yes – entertaining read. A wise, highly crafted and satisfying exploration of life deeply lived in all its infinite refractions and life as we’d like it to be.”
—OLIVE SENIOR, author of Dancing Lessons

ISBN 9781894770941/ Price: $17.95 / 112 pp/ pb/ More

The Space that Connects Us
Mansa Trotman
 

In The Space that Connects Us, Mansa Trotman treats her readers to an exquisite slice of heart renderings carefully crafted to create immediate empathy and spark a glow of feelings. The emotions run deep, the humour surfaces loud and clear, and soon one is over the hump of the rough road
on which she drags your senses. At first, it may only be one hand clapping, but eventually, the joy at the capacity to speak life in the raw is contagious.my heart is breaking
when he sounds rushed, annoyed, disinterested
a rip tears down the centre
my heart is breaking
it is tired, overused, abused by others
unsoothed, neglected and malnourished by me
my heart is breaking
and I have no tools to fix it

the space that connects us was able to eliminate the space between romantic love and lust. From the first poem, the book is an excellent read for those on a higher quest for greater love. “
Kardinal Offishall, Recording Artist
ISBN 9781894770965 / Price: $18.95/ 120 pp/ pb/ More

Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter
Sonia Saikaley

Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter takes the reader from Lebanon’s olive groves to Montreal’s frigid winters and underground malls. These closely connected poems present a narrative threaded with the rich traditions of the Middle East, from its dazzling varied food to its bustling Arabian marketplaces and passionate politics.

Sensuous and shocking, a turbulent voyage of a book. I never thought I’d call a volume of poetry a page-turner, but this one is.”
Susan Musgrave

“Sonia Saikaley’s Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter is a riveting collection where sensuous beauty, borne on a quiet music, collides with stark, often disturbing fact. Rich blues and yellows, antique sounds of sheep and worry beads, and textures and tastes aromatic of the Middle East vividly recreate a life left not entirely behind.”
Susan Ioannou

ISBN 9781894770972 / Price: $17.95 / 104 pp / pb/ More 

 

Redemption Rain
Jennifer Rahim

Engaging with a broad range of human experience and concerns, Redemption Rain invites the reader into its profound epiphanies through patient revisitation and introspection. Rahim’s voice weaves the explosive power of her lively Trinidadian Creole with the searching intensity of one given to appreciating memory’s redemptive light. This is a book about the necessary and the unexpected; about costly arrival in the sacred spaces of realization and recognition. Always the impulse is to praise. Hers is a voice that does not shrill but invests in the finer sensibilities of justice, beauty, love, and community to bring out her poetic truth.

Redemption Rain provides a tenderly perceptive yet penetratingly measured depiction of the contemplative’s path on which spirituality, history, culture, and ecology congregate in unambiguous communal celebration. . . Here then is a poetry that speaks directly to our sense of human belonging, our recognition of smallness within vastness, our experiential encounters with love and loss.”
S Rose-Ann Walker, The University of Trinidad and Tobago 

ISBN 9781894770705 / Price: $17.95 / 112 pp/ pb/ More