Pluviophile

By Yusuf Saadi

Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poems, “The Place Words Go to Die,” winner of The Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, imagines an underworld where words are killed and reborn, shedding their signifiers like skin to re-enter a symbiotic relationship with the human, where “saxum [is] sacrificed and born again as saxifrage.” From here the poems shift to diverse locations, from Montreal to Kolkata, from the moon to the gates of heaven.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Apr 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780889713758

Yusuf Saadi

Yusuf Saadi won the Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizons Poetry Award and the 2016 Vallum Chapbook Award. At other times, his writing has appeared (or is forthcoming) in magazines including Brick, the Malahat Review, Vallum, Grain, CV2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Hamilton Arts & Letters, This and untethered. He is also an executive editor at Sewer Lid magazine. He holds an MA in English from the University of Victoria.

Book preview

Pluviophile

Yusuf Saadi

Nightwood Editions logo 2020

Copyright © Yusuf Saadi, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [e-mail].

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Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

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Cover Design: Charlotte Gray

Typography: Carleton Wilson

Government of Canada wordmark Canada Council for the Arts logo Supported by the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council

Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Pluviophile / Yusuf Saadi.

Names: Saadi, Yusuf, 1990- author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190201312 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190201320 | ISBN 9780889713741 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713758 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS8637.A225 P58 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

For mom ’n abu, suto api, apa moni, biya (and ibi)

Contents

i.

Love Sonnet for Light 11

Breaking Fast 12

Amperage 13

Unpaid Editorial Internship 14

Rough Draft 16

Painting a February Sky 18

August, After Moonset 19

Glossary of Air 20

Semana Santa 22

Reading Borges on the Moon 23

noise… 24

Aubade 25

Nakir 26

For the Girl Who Doesn’t Believe in Time 27

Posthuman 28

The Space Between Pages 30

ii.

Root Canal 33

Pathetic Fallacy in November 34

The Good News Channel 36

Phenomenology of Night 38

Surah 39

Child Sacrifice 42

Tenzing Norgay, Everest 44

Love Poem for Nusaybah’s Hijab 46

Made in Bangladesh 47

eve inventing poetry by her window during the first rainfall 48

Endgame 49

Mile End 50

Sonnet by a Forgotten Twix Wrapper 52

Rilke’s Hands 53

Quietude 54

iii.

The Raindrops at Heaven’s Gates 57

Hunting 58

Toronto, 680 News 60

Joliette 62

If Van Gogh Worshipped the Moon 63

Pedagogy 64

Foreshadows 65

The Place Words Go to Die 66

The Flower Market 68

Road Trip Dictionary 69

The Taxi Driver’s Therapy 70

Spacetime 71

Is the Afterlife Lonely Too? 72

Flowers on Europa 73

lullabies 74

Belittle 75

Pleasuring Shahrazad 76

Notes & Acknowledgements 78

About the Author 80

i.

Love Sonnet for Light

I know a star in Andromeda broke

every