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Those who speak about the carnage are punished by censure, sanction, smearing and worse. Across Canada—and internationally—journalists are muzzled, academics are stifled, doctors are fired, activists are arrested, and artists are banned. Words such as genocide and ceasefire have been excised from the vocabulary, and criticism of the conflict invites accusations of antisemitism.

Razing Palestine brings together the testimonies and stories of a wide range of individuals across a variety of domains who have suffered the cost and consequences of speaking up for Palestine. As Palestine was razed, the courage and the voices of those who raised the issue must be heard.

With a Foreword by Gabor Maté. Contributors include: Sheima Benembarek, Amy Blanding, Safa Chebbi, Libby Davis, Yves Engler, Yipeng Ge, Fred Hahn, Yara Jamal, Thoby King, Nora Loreto, Ehab Lotayef, Samira Mohyeddine, Kagiso Lesego Molope, Arfa Rana, Sean Tucker, and more.

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Featuring evocative art by Malak Mattar and a foreword by Professor Jamil Khader, this collection is a call to remember, resist, and reclaim humanity. A portion of proceeds will support Palestinian relief efforts.

The post The Shadow: Poems for the Children of Gaza appeared first on Read Quebec.

Our increasingly nihilistic age is marked by profound sorrow. We are grieving institutions, art forms, the natural world, our communities – even our very humanity. We are overwhelmed by lives lost to war, violence, genocide, poverty, natural disasters, and disease. We live with the knowledge that a random occurrence could bring an absurd end to any life at any time.

In At Beckett’s Grave Robin Durnford gazes at the granite slab marking the resting place of the Irish playwright. In the middle of the ornate tombstones of an overgrown cemetery in Paris, Durnford finds a powerful metaphor in Samuel Beckett – the artist, the exile, the anti-fascist who joined the French resistance. Beckett’s work – and the stark memory of his life – cuts through grandiose self-regard with a razor-sharp message: there is no final meaning. Yet we move forward, regardless.

It turns out that the pause — the stage direction central to so many of Beckett’s plays — may be the answer. Grief for an absent loved one never truly ends. Grief itself will never end. Yet, the poetic pause creates space for grief to breathe. During that lingering breath, abiding sorrow carves a path toward hope, one word, one poem, at a time.

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In its brevity and persistence, This Radiant Life is a material call for action: it asks us to let go, even just a little bit, of our individuality in favour of mutuality, to arrive separately yet in unison at a radiance in which all living beings can thrive.

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Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.

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