My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan

My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan is a darkly humorous book about grief and isolation. Cutting yet tender, sorrowful yet angry, these poems touch on death and loss, architecture, alcohol, horse statues, and catalogues of life.

My Heart is a Rose Manhattan is a darkly humorous book about grief and isolation. The poems are cutting yet tender; sorrowful yet filled with righteous anger, absurdist at times but still recognizable, reassuring us that “it’s ok to grieve forever.” There is death and loss, architecture, alcohol, horse statues, and catalogues of life away from the urban centres of Canada. This book wants to “subvert the literary industrial complex,” but also crash in like the Kool-Aid meme with all-caps non sequiturs and “overdrawn affluenza.” These poems are addicted to social media and simultaneously well versed in feminist theory. Some of the poems rail against the abuses of rape culture, asking: What is excusable? Who is implicated? Who is believed?