Port of Being

By Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award
Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry

Voyeurism and fact go head to head in Port of Being, a debut book of poetry that mines speech from the city streets and the internet. These are poems set firmly on the threshold of the private and public, the future-haunted and the real, forging the human adrift in a terrain of space junk, drones, and addiction. Port of Being speaks just in time, navigating the worlds of surveillance, migration, and money, only to carve a way into intimacy and connection.

"Ramji has created an insightful, thoughtful, engaging and inspiring guide to being in the digital age."—Hamilton Review of Books

"These poems convey a tense, compelling vigilance.”—Toronto Star

"In equal measures, this book is bioluminescent, galactic, humane. Daring and intimate, it holds worlds.”—Dani Couture, author of Listen Before Transmit

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781988784168

Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Shazia Hafiz Ramji was a finalist for the 2018 Alberta Magazine Awards, received the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2016 National Magazine Awards. Her writing has appeared in Quill & Quire, Canadian Literature, the Puritan, and Metatron’s ALPHA and OMEGA. She lives in Vancouver where she works as an editor and teaches creative writing.

Book preview

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Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Picton

Text copyright © Shazia Hafiz Ramji, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ramji, Shazia Hafiz, author

Port of being / Shazia Hafiz Ramji.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-988784-12-0 (softcover).– ISBN 978-1-988784-16-8 (EPUB)

I. Title.

PS8635.A4632P67 2018 C811’.6 C2018-904416-0

C2018-904417-9

Edited by Wayde Compton

Printed and bound in Canada

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton

www.invisiblepublishing.com

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

for all of us

and for those

who choose to live

fragments torn from an entirely scattered

port of being. Port of being adrift. All relation

a port

— KEN BABSTOCK

CONTAINER

I’m using my own person in pieces.

— VITO ACCONCI

I am forced to make meaning from apparently

disparate elements—in so doing I implicate myself.

— M. NOURBESE PHILIP

See you tomorrow.

Horizon of dried blood on billboards the time for enjoyment

usurped its guise of wet kisses snapped and stored

for the feed tomorrow what moves us is the last note

that sounds like the first a performance for an oratory

words of death on the streets that win win win

best photo for the hangings flayed chickens in Save On Meats

at Hastings a slum appropriated for an orgy in the pink light

walls recede into globes of snow

wet evenings beg for a clean syringe. In the vicinity

bottles of water packed in plastic dusty

father packed in a rug on which a prayer hung

yesterday.

Ma mère