I & I

By George Elliott Clarke

Shortlisted, Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry and Dartmouth Book Award

In the “Boogie Nights” era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back — meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, lust, violence, and the excruciating repercussions of racism, sexism, and disgust. Rastafarian for “you and me,” “I & I” expresses the oneness of God and man, the oneness of two people or the distinction between body and spirit.

In George Elliott Clarke’s hands, this existential aesthetic crystallizes in a love story of Gothic grit. The narrative gives this verse novel shape; the poetry makes it sing, straddling folk ballad, soul, and pop music, all the while moaning the blues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780864928092

George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott Clarke’s books include George & Rue, winner of the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Execution Poems, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry; and Whylah Falls, winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for poetry and chosen for CBC’s inaugural Canada Reads competition. In 2008, he was appointed to the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He was recently the Poet Laureate of Toronto, from 2012 to 2015, and currently teaches at the University of Toronto.

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