Yusuf Saadi

Yusuf Saadi’s first collection, Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions April 2020), was selected by the CBC for its 2020 reading list. He previously won The Malahat Review‘s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and the Vallum Chapbook Award and has published poems in numerous Canadian literary journals. He currently resides in Montreal.

Pluviophile

Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. 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 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, imagines an underworld where words are killed and reborn, shedding signifiers like skin to reenter symbiotic relationships 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.

AuthorYusuf Saadi