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Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots

by (author) Erín Moure

Publisher
New Star Books
Initial publish date
Oct 2017
Category
Personal Memoirs, Addiction, Death & Dying
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781554201419
    Publish Date
    Oct 2017
    List Price
    $21.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781554201471
    Publish Date
    Oct 2017
    List Price
    $9.99

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Description

Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots is the story of a man who had no obituary and no funeral and who would have left no trace if it weren't for the woman he'd called Toots, who took everything she remembered of him and — for seven days — wrote it down.

Erín Moure, a poet who once lived in Vancouver, begins this "work of the imagination" ("minto," in Galician, means "I'm lying") with a quote from Judith Butler about those persons who have "come to belong to the ungrievable," though there may be some that grieve them.

In recording the tale of the little man, through memories and Google searches, the book gives a glimpse into an entire era of urban Canada, from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Main Street and Chinatown to a long-ago Montreal between the Great Depression and Expo '67.

"A beautiful testimony to a life bravely lived on the edges of contemporary values."

— Aaron Peck

About the author

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erín Moure's profile page

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