Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “On love (lviii)” by Salimah Valiani, part of our 2024 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection!

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On love (lviii)

by Salimah Valiani

Raul spoke of the tianguis¹ vendor’s purple quesadillas with

flor de calabaza

Bless shredded marrow into chapati

Ma learned to de-carb puri by mixing part flour part zucchini

on Ayurvedic youtube

food of love comes home in all tongues

1. pre-Columbian markets that travel around Mexico City

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Salimah Valiani is a poet, activist and researcher. 29 leads to love, her fifth poetry collection, won the 2022 International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry. Her previous poetry collections are breathing for breadth (TSAR 2005); Letter Out: Letter In (Inanna 2009); land of the sky (Inanna 2016); Cradles (Daraja 2017). Love Pandemic, Valiani’s first audiobook (also in print) was released by Daraja Press in 2022. Valiani’s new collection, IGoli EGoli, about the city of Johannesburg, will be released by Botstoto Press later this year.

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