Faizal Deen

Faizal Deen (Forrester) was born in Georgetown, Guyana and moved to Canada in 1977. He now resides in Ottawa where he is pursuing a doctorate in English at Carleton University. Deen earned degrees from Queen’s University and the University of Windsor where his creative M.A. thesis included the manuscript poetry recently published as The Greatest Films.

Poetry

The Greatest Films

Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2016.
PS8557 .E295 G74 2016

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

This long poem addresses the imaginations of cultural hybridity as they are formed through passages between real and imagined homelands and host lands, be they Guyana, Canada, or India. The speaker narrates his own past through a splicing of moving pictures taken from a wide selection of twentieth-century cinema. The poem thus employs disjunctive poetic techniques that exteriorize the personal and public histories of the Indo-Guyanese Canadian diaspora. The Greatest Films refashions and revivifies these improvisational sources into a collage of repeating lines of verse that pulls readers back-and-forth; regardless of which direction the poem pushes or pulls the reader, what awaits is always an encounter with the residual nostalgia for “origins.”

Poetry

Land Without Chocolate: A Memoir

Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1999.
PS8557 .E295 L36 1999

Publisher’s Synopsis

Land without Chocolate is Faizal Deen’s startling first book of poetry. This book is a potpourri of delight, bursting with resonances of Peter Pan, Bob Dylan, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison and Shakespeare. The author’s description of the gay culture in both his native and adopted countries is at once subtle and outright. The entire memoir is permeated with the fragrances and flavours of the country of his birth and childhood.