Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. TURKISH DELIGHT, MONTREAL WINTER takes the reader from Lebanon's olive groves to Montreal's frigid winters and underground malls. These closely connected poems present a narrative threaded with the rich traditions of the Middle East, from its dazzling varied food to its bustling Arabian marketplaces and passionate politics.

A lover longs to be reunited with his beloved. A woman mourns the loss of her father and must find her place in a male-dominated culture, while another must relinquish her unborn child. Honest, accessible, and humane, TURKISH DELIGHT, MONTREAL WINTER is a strikingly moving and powerful sequence of poems exploring themes of alienation, intergenerational disconnection, love, and loss.

Sensuous and shocking, a turbulent voyage of a book. I never thought I'd call a volume of poetry a page-turner, but this one is.--Susan Musgrave

Sonia Saikaley's TURKISH DELIGHT, MONTREAL WINTER is a riveting collection where sensuous beauty, borne on a quiet music, collides with stark, often disturbing fact. Rich blues and yellows, antique sounds of sheep and worry beads, and textures and tastes aromatic of the Middle East vividly recreate a life left not entirely behind.--Susan Ioannou