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.

A lover longs to be reunited with his beloved. A woman mourns the loss of her father and must find her place in a male-dominated culture, while another must relinquish her unborn child. Honest, accessible, and humane, Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter is a strikingly moving and powerful sequence of poems exploring themes of alienation, intergenerational disconnection, love, and loss.

Sonia Saikaley was born and raised in Ottawa to a big Lebanese family. The daughter of a shopkeeper, she had access to all the treats she wanted. Her first book, The Lebanese Dishwasher, co-won the 2012 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest. She has two poetry collections: Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter and A Samurai's Pink House. Her novel The Allspice Bath was awarded the 2020 IPPY Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction. She is a graduate of the University of Ottawa and the Humber School for Writers. Many years ago, she belly-danced her way across Northern Japan and taught English there, too. She loves eating labneh and cucumber pita sandwiches on hot summer days.

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"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