Of Architecture The Territories of a Mind

A lively collection populated by historical icons, each poem a story about the potency of imagination, territories, border-crossings of the mind – among them: the madness of a king who wants to be a swan, Michelangelo chiselling a heart that beats into his David, Tsar Peter with his three pet dwarfs acting as generals in the army, Vera Zasulich who became the world’s first woman terrorist, Robinson Crusoe hunting for the footprints of Friday, Michael Jackson pretending he is Marcel Marceau as he woos Marlene Dietrich in Paris…  From the Introduction:“A profound point becomes apparent as one explores Azarov’s juxtaposition of lovely bones: his is a classically trained mind just entered its eighth decade of life, still vibrantly trying to come to terms with that which we all ultimately face, the terrifying awareness of our own inescapable date with the black void of non-existence.”

Vladimir Azarov is an architect and poet, formerly from Moscow, who lives in Toronto. He has published Seven Lives, Broken Pastries, Mongolian Études, Night Out, Dinner With Catherine the Great, Imitation, Of Life and Other Small Sacrifices, The Kiss from Mary Pickford: Cinematic Poems, and Voices in Dialogue: Dramatic Poems – and with Barry Callaghan, Strong Words, translations in an English/Russian bilingual edition, of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, and Andrei Voznesensky. Nina Bunjevac of Yugoslavia deals with themes of the immigrant experience, loneliness and nationalism. Her work has appeared in Mineshaft magazine (USA), Carte Blanche (Canada), Asiatroma (France), Giuda and InguineMah (Italy), Komikaze (Croatia), Balkan Women in Comics (Croatia) and Best American Comics (USA). Her debut collection of comics was Heartless (2012), followed by Fatherland (2014) which was released in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., and translated for release in Germany, France, Czech Republic, Spain and Croatia. Edward Kay is an award-winning Toronto-based writer with an eclectic background in live-action and animated television comedy, as well as fiction and journalism. Like two of his literary heroes, Roald Dahl and Oscar Wilde, Edward is one of the relatively few writers to have a successful career writing for both adults and children.