Be swept into an exploration of Armenian heritage that uncovers universal themes of longing and belonging. The Marrow of Longing, the third book of poetry by Simon Fraser University professor Celeste Snowber, is a deeply personal and interpersonal collection that traces the inherited trauma of the Armenian genocide. These poems drawonkitchen conversations, fragmented memories of grandparents, parents’ love letters, nighttime prayers, and bodily yearning. “Fragments can hold a world,” Snowber writes. A descendant of genocide survivors, she explores the relationship between longing, belonging, and identity—uncoveringthemes that resonate far beyond her own ancestry and guiding readers toward what has shaped their own lives. In excavating her own vulnerabilities and longings, she invites the reader to reflect on their own.
NEW: The Marrow of Longing is now available as an epub. Find it on Kobo or Kindle or most any of your preferred online book retailers today.
$24.95
Celeste Nazeli Snowber, PhD, is a dancer, poet, writer, and award-winning educator who serves as a Professor in the Faculty of Education at
Simon Fraser University. She has published and performed widely, as well as performed and spoken internationally in concert venues, galleries,
museums, conferences, and various outdoor spaces.
Partial proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit the Atken Armenian Foundation of Montreal supporting Armenia’s development through cultural and economic development initiatives.
Celeste Snowber is a creative dynamo encompassing music and dance into her poetry in such a way that it echoes with a myriad of emotions reflecting like a mirror in which we can see our own heart and soul. The Marrow of Longing is a gentle generational walk down a highway of smiles and tears that weaves us into Snowber’s blanket of lyric and dance that permeate the fabric of relationships and life. The words and emotions in this mix of free verse and prose poetry dance with eloquent ease to the surreal symphony they evoke in the reader’s mind.
Candice James, Poet Laureate Emerita, New Westminster, BC and Author of Rithimus Aeternam
Celeste Snowber’s The Marrow of Longing is a liminal site where land, food, bodysoul, the domestic, and the wild intermesh. These poems celebrate the succulent riches of Armenian cuisine in a tradition where food-making and artmaking are one, the kitchen a studio holding an eggplant’s “plum black” richness. Readers are invited to open hearts and minds to the intergenerational traumas of the Armenian genocide of 1915 while stepping into a world where an Armenian mother’s sweeping of floors sweeps us into an ever-present, enduring love.
Susan McCaslin, Author of Into the Open: Poems New & Selected
In this period of tremendous loss for the Armenian nation, it’s good to see that our artists continue to so carefully share our complex and unresolved history through their personal journeys.
Atom Egoyan, Film Director, Writer, Producer
Here, held in the warm love of the familial kitchen and the embrace of earth longing, you can taste beneath the skin of black plum, experience sticky bursts of knowing dancing on your lips, and hear the grace in mother’s admonishment of “Do it again, sweep the floor with love.” Be swept into Snowber’s embrace as she wraps you in voices, echoes and sighs, journeying us through heart and earth healings. While these poems share Snowber’s cultural memory fragments, her words echo universal themes bringing us back to ourselves into the generational embodied cycle of mother, child, mother earth, child, repeating. We are reminded that love is created in making, through birthing, and Snowber generates love in the recursive process of helping us remember. Read and be reborn.
9781990137068
epub: 9781990137594
6 x 9 | 94 pages
