Description
Set in Montreal, Ottawa and Nunavik, Looking for Her explores the intersecting lives of women in search of themselves.
Cate, 43, is a university professor in an unfulfilling marriage. When Nuna, the young Inuk woman she mentors, disappears, Cate and her friend, Isabel, 28, set out on a journey to find her. On the road, their friendship is tested, Nuna remains elusive, and Cate must contend with her ever-demanding husband who wants her to come home. As lead after lead falls through and the search reaches a critical impasse, Cate makes an important decision to stop living for others and finally live life on her own terms.
About the author
Carolyn Marie Souaid has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. The author of six books and the winner of the David McKeen Award for her first collection, Swimming into the Light, she has also been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Much of her work deals with the bridging of worlds; the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility of it, but the necessity of the struggle. She has toured her work across Canada and in France. Since the 1990s, she has been a key figure on the Montreal literary scene, having co-produced two major local events, Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project) and the Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret focusing on the "theatre" of poetry. Souaid is a founding member and editor of Poetry Quebec, an online magazine focusing on the English language poets and poetry of Quebec.
Editorial Reviews
"Souaid crafts a story that is both provoking and pacifying. (. . .) Looking for Her is a novel worth unpacking and talking about." Phoebe Phoebe Yì L?ng, Montreal Review of Books
"[This book] raises some important questions about the White perspective of what our Indigenous people “need. (. . .) Ms. Souaid's writing and storytelling are smooth and very realistic, as are the dialogues. Each character is well-developed." James Fisher, The Seaboard Review
About Carolyn Souaid's first novel
Her language naturally pairs with the physicality of the story . . .. Unsettling realism is enhanced by Souaid's understanding of the complications of race and complicity." Starred Review, Foreword Reviews
"Carolyn Marie Souaid has a brave honest voice and a love for northern Canada and its people that is genuinely moving to read about." Tomson Highway
Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik is the lyrical and absorbing result of a sincere mission to come to grips with another culture.That it took decades to commit to the writing is a tale in itself." Ian McGillis, The Montreal Gazette
For This Side of Light (2022) (Poetry)
"This carefully edited book lives up to the task of bringing together Souaid's powerful poems into a selected volume?a significant contribution to Canadian literature" Jury Citation, Shortlisted for the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher
"Souaid's fearlessness is unapologetic, and offers a courageous worldview, one that doesn?t hide from the truth." Montreal Review of Books
For The Eleventh Hour (2020)
"The Eleventh Hour is deliciously paced and gorgeous. It makes the reader want to slow down and speed up at the same time — to revel in the words and rhythms but also to give in to the narrative thrust of each poem's twists and turns and surprises." The Pacific Rim Review of Books
For This World We Invented (2015)
"Souaid has her fingers so delicately placed on the pulse of her audience that they hardly notice when she starts to pinch?Not many books of poetry dance like this. Sublime and superb. I would like to use every compliment I can think of. Brilliant." Michael Dennis, Today's Book of Poetry, 2015
For Satie's Sad Piano (2004)
"This long poem is perhaps the first serious effort to encompass the nation since Dennis Lee's problematically Ontario centric/Torontonian Civil Elegies appeared in 1968 and 1972." George Elliott Clarke, The Halifax Herald
