Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real

Following Surani’s previous collection Operations, which excavated the debasement done to language by nations worldwide, how does one return to using language for poetry? Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real responds to this question. Amidst the dangers of figurative language, the coercion of sentimentality and the insidious freight of abstraction, these poems embody the necessity for the critical, the communal, the real. This collection uses conceptual critiques of public discourse and experimental social cartographies, as well as lyrics of intimacy, to defy prescribed ways of being.

Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real is an act of resistance against dangerous and domineering narratives, and the power they inscribe.

AUTHOR

Moez Surani

MOEZ SURANI’s writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, Best Canadian Poetry, and The Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported research in India and East Africa. He has been an artist-in-residence in Finland, Italy, Latvia, Myanmar, Switzerland, Taiwan, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, and at MacDowell in the US. He is the author of the novel, The Legend of Baraffo, and various poetry books, including Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real and Operations. Surani lives in Toronto.

Reviews

“Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real offers a mixture of poetic styles and approaches in affecting, thoughtful poems that work hard to interrogate themselves even as they interrogate you.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“There’s an urgency and immediacy to Moez Surani’s fourth collection of poems, in which he grapples with the relationship of poetry and its abstractions to reality.” —Toronto Star

“Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real is a book of thoughtful, serious play, one that carries a meditative weight but isn’t overwhelmed by it.” —rob mclennan