Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry
In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee's much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems' imagery Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem Twelve Storeys making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence Half-Life, written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell
Trade Review
[An] assured debut collection … Sinaee’s turns of phrase are polished and evocative, whether he’s writing about refugees from the chilling perspective of a xenophobe or offering a drily humorous take on life here in the ‘city of delays, / egregious detours.’ * Toronto Star *
