“Black isn’t always the void,” Canisia Lubrin reminds us. In the title poem of her debut collection, the Whitby poet and writer, who was born in St. Lucia, muses on Curiosity, NASA’s Mars rover sent to investigate and collect data on that alien planet. It’s an apt metaphor for the poet’s own mission: to investigate — and interrogate — the markers of black identity by sifting through the artifacts of myth, history, religion, science and pop culture. Politics and pop culture are bedfellows in Toronto poet and fiction writer Spencer Gordon’s entertaining debut poetry collection. As Belcourt puts it, “I am trying to figure out how to be in the world without wanting/it, this perhaps is what it means to be native.”Barbara Carey is a Toronto writer, and the Star’s poetry columnist.

Source: thestar October 27, 2017 03:56 UTC