Books & Collaborations
Currently, I am working full steam ahead with fellow artist Una Janicijevic as part of the Milk Teeth Books Collective. Stay tuned for some incredible projects that will be dropping in 2025!!
Currently, I am working full steam ahead with fellow artist Una Janicijevic as part of the Milk Teeth Books Collective—a multidisciplinary collaboration that merges poetry, visual storytelling, and public engagement. Our goal is to create immersive experiences that disarm cynicism, awaken empathy, and reshape how readers and viewers interact with the world around them. Stay tuned for some extraordinary projects launching in 2025, including a multigenerational picture book that expands into audio, quiltwork, and large-scale public installations.
My most recent collection, Tourist (Tightrope Books), was written across several continents and explores displacement, wonder, and identity in an increasingly fractured world. I’m deeply grateful for the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Molly Peacock (Series Editor, Best Canadian Poetry), whose mentorship offered a clarity I hadn’t found in a decade of working on my own. Poems from Tourist have been published in The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, and Prairie Fire. One was longlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and another highlighted in Best Canadian Poetry Anthology 2015. If you’d like a signed or dedicated copy, I’d love to hear from you.
My debut collection, The Cartographer’s Skin (Piquant Press, 2010), became a Canadian bestseller and was launched at literary festivals and readings across Canada, Ireland, and Singapore. This book continues to find new audiences, and I remain incredibly grateful to the readers who’ve carried its poems into their own lives.
My poetry has also moved into audio spaces through Brickyard (Brick Books Audio), with several poems—Alarm Clocks, Butterfly Remember, Beethoven Walks, and Music Box—featured in the collection. These pieces speak to the interweaving of memory, ritual, and the sensory landscapes of daily life.
In collaboration with composer Mitch Renaud, I developed several performance-based projects that blended poetry and classical music. Our string quartet adaptation of my poem Reckless was performed by the internationally acclaimed St. Lawrence String Quartet (Stanford University) and featured in a concert series at the University of Toronto. We also co-created Generations, a thematic piece for emerging composers, which premiered at Toronto’s historic Haliconian Hall. One of my contributions, Beethoven Walks, was later longlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
This intersection of poetry and public space continues in my installation-based projects. Our Monuments Are Among Us, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, transforms blackout poetry into site-specific works across parks, sidewalks, kitchens, and other spaces marked by “women’s work.” Through banners, mugs, tote bags, and community workshops, the project holds space for underrepresented narratives and daily, unseen acts of resilience.
Alongside this, my forthcoming visual poetry collection, Teaching, reframes the high school hallway as a living archive—one that holds both institutional rigidity and moments of grace, grief, and transformation. The work blends poetic and visual storytelling to explore themes of identity, pedagogy, and the hidden narratives of modern education. I am especially interested in bringing this collection into post-secondary classrooms—particularly within teacher education programs—as a way to spark dialogue around space, belonging, and the evolving role of educators. I’ll be sharing work from Teaching this April as part of an educator-focused panel at the Niagara University Conference.
For inquiries, signed copies, or collaborative ideas, feel free to reach out: larabozabalian@gmail.com.
Website: www.larabozabalian.com
Hello Lara,
I’m so shocked and amazed on your work. I accidentally found this website.
Good luck and best wishes.