Blindfold

“Asfour provides readers with a deeply moving glimpse into the frustrations and disorientation of physical loss, as well as the heroic effort to find the language and metaphors that will translate his experience into poetry.” Harold Heft, Montreal Gazette

Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce’s words, “For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them.” Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is magnified in our minds. In a series of thematically linked poems, Asfour draws the metaphor of the blindfold across the eyes of sighted citizens who are impaired by estrangement, emotional complexity, and social pressures. A sense of exile and belonging dominates the poems, following the journey of a blind man whose life in his new land has been hampered by prejudice and barriers to communication. Exposing the rich and surprising possibilities of a life that has undergone a frightening transformation, Blindfold relates feelings of loss, displacement, and disorientation experienced not only by the disabled but by everyone who finds themselves separated from the norm.
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V6A: Writing From Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

“This work is real, heart wrenching, sublime and necessary. These are slices of lives and memories that come from a space that resonates with sounds of loss, vision and resistance. It is a collection that speaks from the margin to the centre. It is here and it shall remain a timely documentation of a mythical place, a threatened refuge in a blanket of creativity and strength. A significant contribution to this land’s narrative and account.” Rawi Hage, author of DeNiro’s Game

“V6A” is the postal prefix for what is often described as “the poorest neighbourhood in Canada”―Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). Statistics about the area depict conditions related to crime, drugs, sex work, and poverty that overshadow another reality based on self determination. The anthology V6A refracts the experience of thirty-two writers, emerging and established, who have been a part of the DTES community in some way. Their prose, poetry, and essays reappropriate the coding of the area and recast the DTES as a site of creative energy and human dignity.

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When the Words Burn

“Mr. Asfour provides an introduction to modern Arab poetry and its background, while the poems themselves introduce us to inner worlds of political frustration and personal agony and delight that tell us far more about the reality of the Islamic peoples than the utterances of fundamentalist mullahs.” George Woodcock

“John Mikhail Asfour’s book is a valuable contribution toward a better understanding of a complex and turbulent world.” The Ottawa Citizen

“When the Words Burn is one of the most significant contributions to studies on modern Arabic literature.” Matrix

When The Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, 1947-1987 first appeared in 1988, it was (and still is) the first major collection of its sort ever to appear in Canada. It represents a major event in the international world of translation and scholarship, since John Asfour has not only translated the work of thirty-five poets, but also has written a wonderfully engaging and accessible introduction to the social, political, and literary background of the modernist movement in Arabic poetry. BUY IT NOW

More Books written, edited, or translated by John Asfour

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