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Pluviophile
Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery, and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty, and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poems, “The Place Words Go to Die,” winner of The Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, imagines an underworld where words are killed and reborn, shedding their signifiers like skin to reenter a symbiotic relationship with the human, where “saxum [is] sacrificed and born again as saxifrage.” From here the poems shift to diverse locations, from Montreal to Kolkata, from the moon to the gates of heaven.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published April 18, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 4, 2020
Yesterday we swam in the lake by our house in the rain and I couldn't help but think this book. Yusuf Saadi, just like his namesake is a true poet. His words take you on a poetic journey of love, family, and politics. In a time when our attention spans have dwindled down to 150 characters or less it is refreshing to read complex and colourful poetry, like Yusuf's. Thoroughly enjoy all his work.
October 31, 2021
The title says it all. Anyway here’s some of my favorite lines:
Unpaid editorial internship is my favorite poem of the book and it’s for these lines “if there was a pill for hope each pharmacy would be sold out”
“Somwtimes we wish would curl/ (becoming as small as an Oxford comma) /into a warm pothole on a busy street, / live there as part of the city, regard / the world between total eclipses/ cars cause as they drive by”
“Writing poetry at night/ with the rust from our lives.”
“Rough draft” was another favorite of mine I would type out examples why but I would end up underling every word.
“Do I arrive at what I’m becoming?”
There’s way more but this review is already too long. Just go read it.
Unpaid editorial internship is my favorite poem of the book and it’s for these lines “if there was a pill for hope each pharmacy would be sold out”
“Somwtimes we wish would curl/ (becoming as small as an Oxford comma) /into a warm pothole on a busy street, / live there as part of the city, regard / the world between total eclipses/ cars cause as they drive by”
“Writing poetry at night/ with the rust from our lives.”
“Rough draft” was another favorite of mine I would type out examples why but I would end up underling every word.
“Do I arrive at what I’m becoming?”
There’s way more but this review is already too long. Just go read it.
June 8, 2021
Yusuf is the real deal. Brilliant. He's only getting started.
April 4, 2024
2.5 stars; some really good pieces but a lot of them felt like the author intentionally choose the most complicated words possible, and not because they were useful or necessary to the poem itself. This made the experience of reading the book disjointed and laborious (I had to keep looking up the definition of words and the background of stories referenced).
So it comes to a question of who does this writing style serve? Considering the authors extensive publishing history with prestigious literary journals, it feels like the kind of elite, abstract poems that they would enjoy. However, for me, the high-brow word choices came at the cost of the overall clarity of the collection, and it doesn’t feel like a worthwhile trade to me.
Even beyond the unnecessarily complicated language, I didn’t feel like there was much of a common thread between these poems. The collection jumps from piece to piece but I didn’t even get a similar feeling from them all.
TLDR: this book ultimately fell flat for me and was more work than enjoyment. Read if you want to, but it’s not life-changing.
So it comes to a question of who does this writing style serve? Considering the authors extensive publishing history with prestigious literary journals, it feels like the kind of elite, abstract poems that they would enjoy. However, for me, the high-brow word choices came at the cost of the overall clarity of the collection, and it doesn’t feel like a worthwhile trade to me.
Even beyond the unnecessarily complicated language, I didn’t feel like there was much of a common thread between these poems. The collection jumps from piece to piece but I didn’t even get a similar feeling from them all.
TLDR: this book ultimately fell flat for me and was more work than enjoyment. Read if you want to, but it’s not life-changing.
April 27, 2022
2.5
Intellectually i think the poems here show promise but i never really loved or connected with any one poem in particular. I do think he's doing interesting things with word play here tho (Joliette was particularly interesting) and i do like the very Canadian poems like 680 news etc.
Intellectually i think the poems here show promise but i never really loved or connected with any one poem in particular. I do think he's doing interesting things with word play here tho (Joliette was particularly interesting) and i do like the very Canadian poems like 680 news etc.
December 3, 2021
This collection is a love letter to human language. Evocative on every page.
January 23, 2022
"Unpaid editorial internship" hit really deep. I love "For the girl who doesn't believe in time" and "hunting". The poems in the third part are unsettling.
June 21, 2020
I found Yusuf Saadi’s debut book “Pluviophile” powerful in the way that he was able to illicit meaning from each of his poems. The topics discussed were important and relatable, making it hard to put the book down. I re-read it many times just to take in his witty play on words and to fully appreciate the imagery. Some of my favourite poems included, Surah, Mile End, Pathetic Fallacy in November, Child Sacrifice and the Flower Market. Each and every poem evoked a desire in me to continue reading, and by the end I was sad that it was over!
I would definitely recommend this book.
I would definitely recommend this book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews