Brockton Writers Series 14.09.22: Jennifer Hosein blog post

Brockton Writers Series 14.09.22: Jennifer Hosein blog post

Brockton Writers Series 14.09.22: Jennifer Hosein’s blog post

HEART

     As a writer and visual artist, my work tends to overlap. In difficult times, I lean into one or the other, or both, for sustenance. Therefore, when my mother’s aortic valve needed replacing, I began to write frantically about our time together.

     After her passing, I did not know how to survive, so I painted. Madly. I painted my mother from old black-and-white photos and found her in the hours that I spent looking into her face. I am still painting her, nine years later, still privileged to be in her company. She never leaves me!

     I’d like to share a video of the poem “Heart” from my book A Map of Rain Days, as well as an excerpt from a work-in-progress:

Excerpt:

January 5th:

  Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday. I promised her a cake before midnight, and I do everything I can to stop the car from turning me back home, my heart pounding against the steering wheel. But my mother is waiting by the window. She doesn’t know, and then she does, tossing fragments of her old life into plastic bags: a handful of photographs, a miscellany of yellowed papers, a tattered jewelry box, too-tight clothes, slippers.

     I am paralyzed. I cannot pull myself up off the floor where I spent much of the summer in a pile of sleeping bags and pillows, paper and pencils. There will never be another summer like that: doctor’s waiting rooms, Chinese supermarkets, creamy popsicles from the Pakistani grocer’s, trips to the lake. Sometimes, then, I felt caged. Now, it’s all I want.

     My aunt’s house is warm, but my mother’s new bedroom is wintry and smells of mothballs and cat. I spray perfume into corners, place a few of my mother’s photographs on the dresser top, tune the clock radio to the jazz station we listened to on dusk drives from my aunt’s house back to my mother’s apartment. How I will miss those drives! Helping my mother dress for bed, I take her socks off, pull a flannel nightgown over her head, kiss her and tuck her into the cold, stinking night before I go.

     I race down the Don Valley Parkway toward January 6th, but there is a car rolled over on the highway. I run in the door at 11:54 p.m., just in time to put candles on the cake and sing “Happy Birthday” to my daughter. Love fills me up like a balloon, so full and stretched and thin am I.

Brockton Writers Series, September 14, 2022

Brockton Writers Series, September 14, 2022

Brockton Writers Series – Wednesday, September 14, 2022 at 6:30 p.m.

As we adapt with current pandemic regulations, we’re happy to announce our event will be hosted in-person at the Glad Day Bookshop, located at 499 Church St., Toronto, starting in September! We will also live stream the event on the Brockton Writers Series YouTube channel!
Guest Speaker: Kathy Friedman on “Writing & Survival: Some Tips for Mad, Sad, and Neurodiverse Folks”
Readers:
Oubah Osman
Jennifer Hosein
Kimia Eslah
Farzana Doctor
The reading is PWYC (suggested $3-$5) and features a Q&A with the writers afterward. Books are available for sale.
Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their support.
 
Lost Launches IV, June 28th, 7 p.m.

Lost Launches IV, June 28th, 7 p.m.

The Lost Launches Poetry Readings – Tuesday, June 28, 2022, 7 p.m.

Toronto Poet Laureate Al Moritz, the City of Toronto, The Art Bar and the League of Canadian Poets are teaming up to create a series of book launches to celebrate the Toronto poets and poetry collections that were published throughout the pandemic. This series aims to highlight the work of these poets and their works, which were not celebrated in person as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
 
Join us on Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 7pm at Clinton’s to celebrate the second event in this incredible series.
This will be a free event.
Poet Kate Marshall Flaherty will be our MC for the evening.
Location: Clinton’s (693 Boor W. south-west corner of Clinton and Bloor near Christie) Toronto, Ontario
Ari’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days

Ari’s Goodreads review of A Map of Rain Days

I had never read Hosein before this book, so I wasn’t really sure what I was in for. And well, I still am not sure what it was that this book has done to me, but my heart feels brutalized in the most welcome of ways.

My brother
has no time
for the heart-breakingness
of the old

and I have no place left
to put the sorrow
she hands to me.

The poems in this collection are each a culmination of the mundane pain we all feel everyday, and yet Hosein writes it such that you are introduced to it altogether anew. In Waitingwe are met with a mother awaiting her son, and the daughter forgotten save for the company she provides, and I find it so beautifully heart-wrenching. Wedding Day gave me the goosebumps at how savage it can be to ache.

There are some pieces that are more abstract than the others, and I love them too because of my love for abstract poetry, and there are some that are just so concrete and cutting that you could bleed on them.

Hosein here has written a brilliant collection that pulls at your heart and chews at its strings, only to leave you winded once you’re through with the book.