All Violet
In All Violet, a young woman chronicles the experience of living on the margins, in spaces and places where body and mind are flayed by guilt, disappointments and betrayals. Her poems record the shattering trauma of struggling to survive through periods of doubt, fear, rage and pain, creating a narrative of disconnection, indignation, alienation and emptiness, the extremes of suffering and desperation.
Employing lyrical free verse, Rani Rivera has skillfully employed the short line to pinpoint moments of acute perception.
Unadorned, taut and precise cries of pain, loss and fury draw the reader deeper and deeper inside this in-your-face confrontation with a dark world of foreboding alleviated by flashes of mordant wit and grace under fire.
Rani Rivera
After studying at the University of Toronto, where she majored in English, poet Rani Rivera worked as a community coordinator at Progress Place while she herself was living on the margins, struggling with trauma, past addiction and depression. This legacy of poems, All Violet, was discovered after her death among her papers.
- these lyrical free verse poems are championed, posthumously, by significant members of Toronto's literary community including members of the Literary Press Group
- author was a very accomplished social entrepreneur who provided services to more than a thousand people in resource-poor areas northwest of Toronto
- author represents the unique voice of a queer-femme Filipina woman struggling with depression and loss
- author educated by Lynn Crosbie, bill bissett, David Bateman, Regie Cabico and U of T's English Literature program
- royalties from the book go towards Progress Place, a charitable organization that further's the authors work with the vulnerable
- POETRY / LGBT (POE021000)
- POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss (POE023010)
- FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Death, Grief, Bereavement (FAM014000)
