Aaron Rabinowitz writes with rare sensitivity and careful, aching perception about the relationships that weave our lives. – Alex Leslie
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This is a book of wonder. With a tender curiosity and an unsentimental eye, Aaron Rabinowitz performs an archaeology of the everyday, surfacing a beguiling mixture of quirky facts, family anecdotes, nonconformists, and bad jokes. In his hands these moments shimmer with newness: a child learns to talk, a student falls in love in the desert, landscapes of ghost trees become “armless parents that cannot hug back.”
Suggestions is a Venn diagram that overlaps poetry with prose, environmental matters with personal concerns, humour with poignancy, and everyday language with emotional depth. Unassuming, playful, and wise, these prose poems show us how the past and memory continually shape our lives.
Aaron Rabinowitz’s debut poetry collection is a delight. Here is a voice infused with wonder, humour, curiosity, anger, wisdom, and sorrow at our sorry state as human beings, our funny, wondrous, angry, curious state. Do yourself a favour; read this book.
– Rhea Tregebov, author of Talking to Strangers
Aaron Rabinowitz writes with rare sensitivity and careful, aching perception about the relationships that weave our lives. In his hands, the form of the prose poem bends and folds to evoke layered memory and unresolved storylines, never falling into the trap of sentimentality. He leaves the reader awash in tender detail, the quiet music of the quotidian, polished and concise, oblique and pure.
– Alex Leslie, author of Vancouver for Beginners
With a reporter’s eye and a poet’s attention, Aaron Rabinowitz’s Suggestions sifts through the daily to find the moments of beauty, of discord, of reflection. Each sentence tautly re-spools the thread of a moment, reeling the real around the wooden bobbin of family.
– Derek Beaulieu, author of Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century
Here’s my suggestion: Open this book and read one succinct and memorable prose poem after another. If you are a parent, if you’re a disappearing uncle, if you didn’t know that a robin only lives two years, you’re about to find yourself and learn so much from this astonishing debut.
– Jane Munro, author of False Creek
