A Map of Rain Days
Select Format
Select Condition 
Book Overview
The poems in A Map of Rain Days address the beauty and shadows of life while navigating the realities of racism, addiction, suicide, rape, abuse and death. Ecstasy and loneliness, romance and terror are juxtaposed. Love is brutal and intoxicating, adolescence is "the carcass of youth." Yet still we live and love and come out kicking.
The poems in A Map of Rain Days span a lifetime, moving backwards from the loss of a mother to when the speaker was a "tiny girl in a third-floor walk-up." The title of the book comes from the poem of the same name, in which the speaker walks "down the corridors/in her] mother's bruised shoes;" when she describes her mother's toes as "crooked and curled/in a misguided, arthritic map/of rain days," the speaker is describing the life she has lived.
Winter is a metaphor for isolation, darkness and death. The speaker lives in a country that "is an ice storm." Aunty and Uncle are "hidden in rock/and snow." Death and winter are inextricably linked: "Mother floats around the car/with the snow" and "snow...caresses a man who struggles/with his foolproof design/for suicide." Even love and longing are locked in winter: "bent over you/I become the stillness of night, the snow itself."
Love and loss feature in the poems: love for a mother and a daughter, longing for a lover, and the loss of a best friend. Love is overpowering. When the speaker has to move her mother out of her apartment on the eve of her daughter's birthday, "Love fills her] up like a ballooon, /so full and stretched and thin is she]." When her daughter moves across the continent, the speaker holds "tight to the pillow/that she] laid her] head upon/as if it were love/itself." When a friend dies unexpectedly, the speaker cannot let him go, and there is "a can of Diet Coke/that she is] keeping for the next time/ he stops] by."
Love is both brutal and intoxicating. The speaker longs for a man who, "when she pauses] to wipe/the sand from her] eyes... is] gone." Romance "has been chewed/out of her]/kisses carved away," yet still she listens to a lover's "breath fall/and the cacophony of sheets/against their] skin."
There is violence in love: a controlling husband who would "cut her] breasts off/so no man/can look at them" and a lover who "turned her] to ash that stuck/to the soles of his] feet/during his] tirades/and blackouts." In all of this, the speaker becomes "the thin voice itself/and little more." When she tries to escape, she turns around "to find him: /in his hands he holds all of me."
Living in exile is another motif in the book. Born and raised in Montreal, the speaker, whose background is South Asian, experiences "the swill and gore" of adolescence in a hostile Toronto suburb. Struggling to live in a world where "sticks and stones broke all of her]," she wonders how her father learned "to put his feet down/on unfamiliar soil." But it is possible to look racism in the eye; responding to the racist taunts of a man on a bus, the speaker tells him "my mother's black coat/against the winter-white paysage is always/and only home/and he/should be so lucky." When the speaker has finally begun to feel that "in her] tiny radius/of the world/ she is] almost white," Donald Trump wins the American election, and racism rears its ugly head full on.
However, despite all the hardships life throws at the speaker, life goes on, and she lives and loves and comes out stronger.
Related Subjects
PoetryCustomer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
