
Poetry
Rouge: Poems
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2018.
PS8607 .E23525 R68 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.
Links
Publisher Mawenzi House
Adrian De Leon biography page at the University of Toronto’s PhD in History website