Metropolis

Metropolis is a visionary work that dreams the elegiac landscape of cities like Toronto, where genteel Victorian culture leans hard against Sri Lankan ghettos; where prostitutes and cocaine dealers ply their trade next to green streets immaculate with rose gardens. In Metropolis, urban portraits of violence, grief, mourning, and joy are underscored by philosophical, historical, and theological concerns. Rishma Dunlop has a gift for looking at cities in all their contradictory beauty and reading the scars of history as the graffiti of everyday life.

“If there is a precipice at which language, especially its lyrical form, must hover, in order for one to feel dangerously alive and subsequently on the verge of death, then Toronto poet Rishma Dunlop takes us there, seducing us with a relentless passion for the intangible beauty wrought visible in ‘objects’ cathected with reverence and desire.” (West Coast Line)