Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry
In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through.
Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry
In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 6, 2021 |
| Specifications | 120 pages | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
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Supporting Resources
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the chapbooks Blue Night Express and Salamander Festival. His poems have also appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. In 2012 his poem “Barnacle Goose Ballad” was Reader’s Choice winner for The Walrus Poetry Prize, and in 2020 he was co-winner of the Capilano Review’s Robin Blaser Award. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Guelph University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Intruder is his first book. |
| Written By |
|
BARDIA SINAEE was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the chapbooks Blue Night Express and Salamander Festival. His poems have also appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. In 2012 his poem “Barnacle Goose Ballad” was Reader’s Choice winner for The Walrus Poetry Prize, and in 2020 he was co-winner of the Capilano Review’s Robin Blaser Award. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Guelph University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Intruder is his first book. |
Winner, Trillium Book Award for Poetry, 2022
Long-listed, Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, 2022
Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 2022
“[An] assured debut collection … Sinaee’s turns of phrase are polished and evocative, whether he’s writing about refugees from the chilling perspective of a xenophobe or offering a drily humorous take on life here in the ‘city of delays, / egregious detours.’” —Toronto Star
“Intruder is a book that wants to ‘welcome the world, all of it’ — birdsong and myth, magnolias and the city, along with the ‘slow ghost / pushing a drip stand /down the corridor.’ We sit with the poet in a room with two windows; we sit with the patient as a central venous catheter is inserted into his chest. Sinaee writes that ‘all poems are true/even ugly ones.’ But there are no ugly poems in this surprising, moving, and darkly humorous debut collection — only true ones.” —
“Attuned to discourses regarding the spectral nature of just about everything,’ Bardia Sinaee illuminates our modern gothic in his debut collection, Intruder. Haunted by the political history of the Middle East, by the precarity of the contemporary Canadian metropole, and by the spectre of death — ‘That slow ghost / pushing a drip stand / down the corridor / That’s me’ — this existential intruder questions just about everything, including himself. ‘Maybe you ask too many questions,’ writes the poet, ‘Maybe it’s time to let the wind have your clothes.’ Wondrously, Sinaee’s lyric interrogations hold us captive even as they invite us to imagine our escape.” —Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit
“Intruder is a book that wants to ‘welcome the world, all of it’ — birdsong and myth, magnolias and the city, along with the ‘slow ghost / pushing a drip stand /down the corridor.’ We sit with the poet in a room with two windows; we sit with the patient as a central venous catheter is inserted into his chest. Sinaee writes that ‘all poems are true/even ugly ones.’ But there are no ugly poems in this surprising, moving, and darkly humorous debut collection — only true ones.” —Jen Currin, author of School