Book Description
As rich and exuberant as its title, Red Silk, an anthology of poems by women who identify as South Asian, is an important contribution to the growing body of South Asian Canadian literature. Ably edited by Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal, with a superb "Introduction," Red Silk launches some powerful South Asian female, and feminist, voices on the Canadian literary scene. These poets explore the complexity, diversity, and heterogeneity of South Asian Canadian identity by examining their relationships, as women, to the South Asian cultures that they live in their bones, memory, and daily lives. These poems enact how an ordinary household object, a word, a smell, a gesture, can all trigger a cascade of memories and responses soaked in cultural significance, and mark one as South Asian. Drawing on the deep well of South Asian cultural memory and its semiotic treasure house, these poets redefine and expand both Canadian culture and Canadian literature.
About the Author
Priscila Uppal is a poet, fiction writer, academic, and professor of Humanities and English at York University. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including:
Winter Sport: Poems (Mansfield Press, 2010),
Successful Tragedies: Selected Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K. 2010), and
Traumatology (Exile Editions, 2010). Her works have been published internationally and translated into numerous languages. Additionally, she is the editor of several anthologies and essay collections. Priscila Uppal’s works have been taught in several countries. She is a frequent guest on radio, television, and in print media, and has designed and led writing workshops for over a decade. She lives in Toronto.
Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush; a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece; and a one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering Verge.” She is a contributing editor of the Literary Review of Canada and a faculty mentor at the Spalding MFA Program. Her latest work of nonfiction is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72, which was nominated for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
Winner of the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry, Rishma Dunlop is the author and editor of several collections of poetry. She is Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at York University and the founding editor of the international poetry journal Studio. She was also a finalist for the CBC Canada Council Literary Awards in 1998.
