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Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry
In Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.
Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy in his mid-twenties, documented in the vertiginous multipart prose poem “Twelve Storeys” — making Intruder a book that seems especially timely, notably in the dreamlike, minimalist sequence “Half-Life,” written during the lockdown in Toronto in spring 2020.
Progressing from plain-spoken dispatches about city life to lucid nightmares of the calamities of history, the poems in Intruder ultimately grapple with, and even embrace, the daily undertaking of living through whatever the hell it is we’re living through.
“Attuned to discourses regarding the spectral nature of just about everything,’ Bardia Sinaee illuminates our modern gothic in his debut collection, Intruder. Haunted by the political history of the Middle East, by the precarity of the contemporary Canadian metropole, and by the spectre of death — ‘That slow ghost / pushing a drip stand / down the corridor / That’s me’ — this existential intruder questions just about everything, including himself. ‘Maybe you ask too many questions,’ writes the poet, ‘Maybe it’s time to let the wind have your clothes.’ Wondrously, Sinaee’s lyric interrogations hold us captive even as they invite us to imagine our escape.” — Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit
“Intruder is a book that wants to ‘welcome the world, all of it’ — birdsong and myth, magnolias and the city, along with the ‘slow ghost / pushing a drip stand /down the corridor.’ We sit with the poet in a room with two windows; we sit with the patient as a central venous catheter is inserted into his chest. Sinaee writes that ‘all poems are true/even ugly ones.’ But there are no ugly poems in this surprising, moving, and darkly humorous debut collection — only true ones.” — Jen Currin, author of School
“[An] assured debut collection … Sinaee’s turns of phrase are polished and evocative, whether he’s writing about refugees from the chilling perspective of a xenophobe or offering a drily humorous take on life here in the ‘city of delays, / egregious detours.’” — Toronto Star