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.

Review of A Map of Rain Days by Ivy Reiss of The Artis Magazine

Review of A Map of Rain Days by Ivy Reiss of The Artis Magazine

Jennifer Hosein’s poetry is relevant, emotional, evocative, and beautiful. Jennifer’s poetry shows us what it’s like to be a person of colour in Canada without allowing identity to overshadow poetic craft. Her work combines the power of short story with the music of poetry, invoking the ubiquitous human experiences of losing people we love and finding our place in the world. Jennifer Hosein’s debut collection A Map of Rain Days at once illustrates the commonality and alienation that is characteristic of contemporary existence. We know Jennifer as a visual artist, now it is time to meet her as a poet.

—Ivy Reiss, The Artis magazine, Sept 02nd 2020.

Brandon Pitts’ recommendation for A Map of Rain Days

Brandon Pitts’ recommendation for A Map of Rain Days

I’ve decided to break my long social media silence to share this with you because poetic masterpieces are rare. A poet is lucky to have even one in a career. The first poem, “I Love You”, in @jennifer.hosein_poet.painter first collection of poems, “A Map Of Rain Days,” is quite a masterpiece. Each time I’ve been exposed to it, I’ve experienced it with awe, joy, and envy. Envy because I wish I had written it.
As for the rest of the collection, it is extremely consistent in its strength. Each poem is perfectly executed, and is a testament to the poet’s talent. Guernica has done a fine job in presenting this exceptional artist’s poetic statement for mass consumption. Buy this book!
 
       — Brandon Pitts, author of Tender in the Age of Fury and In the Company of Crows, September 2, 2020