OUT WEST is Out Now!  | April 1, 2024

I was honoured and humbled when my friend Michael O’Leary asked me if I would write a blurb for his newest book of poems, OUT WEST. Michael had shared drafts as he wrote and revised the poems, and I knew that they were shaping up to be unique and mesmerizing.

The book is out. I’m excited to share that he has created a mind-altering work of intellect, passion and rare vision. Words that come to mind include adventure, intense, physics, surreal, longing, probing, masterful, unusual, rare. These poems are strange and gorgeous.

OUT WEST is a reflection of the brilliant polymath I know Michael to be – poet, engineer, professional quant, husband, father, a man with as earnest and restless a mind and soul as you’ll ever encounter, steeped in numbers, lit, music, nature and curiosity.

Over years, I’ve swum in many rivers and lakes with Michael, trekked dense forests, explored ink-black caverns, risked death by heat, cold and gravity. I vouch for him. He’s the real deal, an adventurer of the world we see as well as the many possible worlds of the imagination.

Cribbing from Rilke, I encourage you to buy OUT WEST and change your life. You can order it from The Cultural Society today: bit.ly/3VGJBUS

Review of Colson Whitehead’s novel ‘Harlem Shuffle’ for Harvard Review | December 7, 2021

Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle is a bravura performance, an immersive, laugh-out-loud, riveting adventure whose narrative energy is boosted by its memorable hero and a highly relevant backdrop of social injustice. Set from 1959 to 1964, the novel comprises three episodes charting the precarious rise of Ray Carney, a self-made man who habitually dips and sometimes dives into New York’s criminal underworld. Read my review here.

Review of Laila Lalami’s book ‘Conditional Citizens’ for Harvard Review | November 8, 2020

Conditional Citizens book cover

In her new book Conditional Citizens, Laila Lalami argues that America’s vaunted diversity and pluralism are undermined by actions designed to differentiate systematically between an “us” group and an “other” group. Lalami pairs her compelling personal narrative with perceptive and wide-ranging insights to reveal the cultural, social, and historical forces that create our modern American caste system. Read my review here.

Review of Esi Edugyan’s novel ‘Washington Black’ for Literary Review of Canada | October 6, 2018

Esi Edugyan brings extraordinary talent and ingenuity to the subject of slavery in her epic novel, Washington Black, a sprawling tale of adventure centred on a young boy who escapes from slavery on a Barbadian plantation in the early 1830s. Read my review here.

(Note: Subscribe to the Literary Review of Canada to access, or look for the October print edition at your local bookstore.)