news | Friday October 9, 2015

Jewel tones on a dark and stormy night

Cosmophilia, which means “love of ornament,” is the debut collection of poetry by Rahat Kurd, of whose emergence in Canadian poetry we at Talon are very proud. This deliberate and well-paced collection, packaged in cosmic colours behind a cover that reflects the poems’s juxtaposition of the darkness and lightness of being, is now available for $16.95.

An emotionally powerful collection, the poems in Cosmophilia follow the elaborate, unexpected turns of the poet’s imagination and memory, intertwining political conflict and family history, and translating multiple glittering facets of Muslim culture into the immediacy of embodied, urban Canadian experience.

Cosmophilia launched last evening in Vancouver to a warm audience of about 40 people at the Heartwood Café.

Rahat Kurd reads from Cosmophilia at the book launch last evening

Rahat Kurd reads from Cosmophilia after being introduced by poet, fiction writer, and activist Marguerite Pigeon

Seemi Ghazi, lecturer in Classical Arabic at UBC read short poems in translation from Faiz and delighted the crowd with short poem sung in Arabic

The audience enjoys the readings

The audience is moved by the poems

Kurd introduced a few minutes of audience participation toward the end; audience members volunteered to hold up lines from poems by Lal Ded, and the crowd read out each line as it was revealed

And a final uplifting moment … 

Talon is very pleased to have published this wonderful book and thanks everyone who joined us for the launch.