RBC Bronwen Wallace Award winner Noor Naga's bracing debut, a novel-in-verse about a young woman's romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith.
2021 Arab American Book Award - George Ellenbogen Poetry Award, Winner
Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Winner
Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Longlist
Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry, Second Place Winner
CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020
Coocoo is a young immigrant woman in Toronto. Her faith is worn threadbare after years of bargaining with God to end her loneliness and receiving no answer. Then she meets her mirror-image; Muhammad is a professor and father of two. He's also married.
Heartbreaking and hilarious, this verse-novel chronicles Coocoo's spiraling descent: the transformation of her love into something at first desperate and obsessive, then finally cringing and animal, utterly without grace. Her best friend, Nouf, remains by her side throughout, and together they face the growing contradictions of Coocoo's life. What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets? These are some of the questions this verse-novel swishes around in its mouth.
Autorentext
NOOR NAGA was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and currently lives in Alexandria, Egypt. Her writing has appeared in The Puritan, Hart House Review, Muftah, and The Sultan's Seal and was shortlisted for Room magazine's 2015 Fiction Contest. She received a Canada Graduate Scholarship-Master's, and the Mary Coyne Rowell Jackman Graduate Scholarship and Avie Bennett Emerging Writers Scholarship from the University of Toronto, where she completed her MA in creative writing.