TOURIST: Here & Now
Tourist is here.
Join us at the launch on March 31 or pre-order now from Tightrope Books.
Opening with an aubade for the labyrinthian corners of Bombay’s largest slum, Tourist is a collection that is unafraid of shadows, and aims to unearth the unseen. Set across time and landscape—modern day Michigan, 1970’s Cambodia, WWI England, the kaleidoscopic mindscape of an Alzheimer patient—these poems draw us into lives that, initially, seem foreign, yet provoke our solidarity in the face of disorientation—a boy facing his first bankruptcy, an Elephant facing destruction at the hands of poachers. The book culminates in ‘Beethoven Walks’, an elegiac war cry from a man who wades in and out of darkness like a modern day Odysseus, and the churning resilience that sets him free.
“Wakefulness is poet Lara Bozabalian’s traveling companion in her new collection, ‘”Tourist.” Her lines are long with an inviting tendency to wander. Her similes are startling, her descriptions dressed to kill. Capturing the spirit of places like India, Cuba, Cambodia and suburban Ontario, the poems are maps rather than postcards “Fluency (is) a language all its own,” she writes, one that she speaks with thoughtfulness and gusto.” – Barry Dempster, author of The Burning Alphabet and Disturbing the Buddha
