Adrian De Leon

Adrian De Leon is a Toronto-based Filipino Canadian and student of history. After graduating with an honours BA in English literature from the University of Toronto, Scarborough, he received direct entry into the PhD programme in history at the University of Toronto. De Leon is also a food historian and culinary ethnographer.

Poetry

Rouge: Poems

Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2018.
Forthcoming Oct. 2018

Publisher’s Synopsis

Toronto the not-so-good? This series of poems is a response to the 2012 Danzig Street mass shooting at a block party in Toronto’s Scarborough area, during a period when gun violence had reached a peak in the city. Here the city’s east end becomes a source of poetic inspiration, and the east-west subway line as the organizing structure. Going from west to east, each poem is informed by a TTC subway stop, inspiring form, voice and content. We get meditations, commentary, and visual poetry. The conclusion is a pair of poems, both titled “Rouge”: the first makes use of reports, songs, and tweets that appeared following the shooting and the second is a lyrical response.