Pluviophile
CBC Books | | Posted: June 30, 2020 6:43 PM | Last Updated: December 8, 2020
Yusuf Saadi
Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poems, "The Place Words Go to Die," winner of The Malahat Review's 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, imagines an underworld where words are killed and reborn, shedding their signifiers like skin to re-enter a symbiotic relationship with the human, where "saxum [is] sacrificed and born again as saxifrage." From here the poems shift to diverse locations, from Montreal to Kolkata, from the moon to the gates of heaven. (From Nightwood Editions)
Yusuf Saadi is a poet from Montreal. Pluviophile is his first collection. He won the Malahat Review's 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry for the poem The Place Words Go to Die, which is in Pluviophile. CBC Books named Saadi a writer to watch in 2020.