Rouge

To commemorate a tragedy.

This series of poems is a response to the 2012 mass shooting at a block party on Danzig Street, Scarborough (Toronto). The city’s east end becomes a source of poetic inspiration, and the two intersecting subway lines provide the organizing structure. From west to east, and north to south–Kipling to McCowan, Finch to Downsview–the stations on the way inspiring form, voice, and content, meditation, commentary, and geometry. The City is the Poem.

The Discovery Walk,
inviting my well-worked Clarks
to pry my feet from the confines
of the station,
wasn’t necessary to make
a most marvelous Discovery:
the bus sign, hung with steel
–from “Old Mill”

AUTHOR

Adrian De Leon

Adrian De Leon is an award-winning writer and public historian. His most recent books are barangay: an offshore poem (Buckrider Books, 2021), which was named one of the best Canadian poetry collections of 2021 by CBC Books, and Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). He teaches Asian American Studies in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, and will soon move to New York University to teach US-Philippine histories.

Reviews

“[A]n enjoyable and various book all around.” —University of Toronto Quarterly

“Rouge is spiky and caustic yet delights in more ways than you could count Toronto the Good’s abundant pleasures, quirks and treasures.” —Philippine Daily Inquirer

“For De Leon, Toronto and Scarborough are cities filled with life and inexhaustible rhythm. They’re messy, complicated, boring, romantic, fun, dangerous, and, for better or worse, discoverable.” —Debutantes