Turkish Delight, Montreal Winter

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. TURKISH DELIGHT, MONTREAL WINTER takes the reader from Lebanon's olive groves to Montreal's frigid winters and underground malls. These closely connected poems present a narrative threaded with the rich traditions of the Middle East, from its dazzling varied food to its bustling Arabian marketplaces and passionate politics.

A lover longs to be reunited with his beloved. A woman mourns the loss of her father and must find her place in a male-dominated culture, while another must relinquish her unborn child. Honest, accessible, and humane, TURKISH DELIGHT, MONTREAL WINTER is a strikingly moving and powerful sequence of poems exploring themes of alienation, intergenerational disconnection, love, and loss.

"Sensuous and shocking, a turbulent voyage of a book. I never thought I'd call a volume of poetry a page-turner, but this one is."—Susan Musgrave

"Sonia Saikaley's TURKISH DELIGHT, MONTREAL WINTER is a riveting collection where sensuous beauty, borne on a quiet music, collides with stark, often disturbing fact. Rich blues and yellows, antique sounds of sheep and worry beads, and textures and tastes aromatic of the Middle East vividly recreate a life left not entirely behind."—Susan Ioannou

Sonia Saikaley was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada. She grew up in a traditionalLebanese household and much of her writing is influenced by her rich Middle Eastern heritage. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Things Japanese: A Collection of Short Stories, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and the anthology Lavandera - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and the University of Ottawa. Her first book, The Lebanese Dishwasher (Quattro Books, 2012), was co-winner of the 2012 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest.