The East Side of It All - by Joseph Dandurand (Paperback)

About the Book

"Dandurand's work tackles complicated personal and social issues by drawing on his observations of the natural world. His voice is lyrical yet intimate, obscured, yet sitting with you at the kitchen table having a cigarette. The East Side of it All is the journey of a broken man gifted with stories and poems who finally accepts his gift and shares with the world his hidden misery and joy: there was this woman that I fell in love with but she will never know who I am and I hide in the back of the room as she goes about her thing and I go about mine, and once I tried to look into her eyes but when she looked back, I knew she was a spirit and I was still a human and she passed right through me and I felt the coldness of her."--

Book Synopsis

Dandurand's work tackles complicated personal and social issues by drawing on his observations of the natural world. His voice is lyrical yet intimate, obscured yet sitting with you at the kitchen table having a cigarette. The East Side of It All is the journey of a broken man gifted with stories and poems who finally accepts his gift and shares with the world his hidden misery and joy:

there was this woman that I fell in love

with but she will never know who I am and I hide

in the back of the room as she goes about her thing

and I go about mine, and once I tried to look

into her eyes but when she looked back, I knew

she was a spirit and I was still a human and she passed

right through me and I felt the coldness of her

Review Quotes

Hands down, Joseph Dandurand is one of my all-time favourite writers... Good Lord--what a voice!

--Richard Van Camp

How does the Romantic keep on if he's a contemporary First Nations guy? Like the poet Dandurand. There's an honest that gets bare bones scary in some of these free verse poems... but thanks to the clarity, often irony of his vision, our awkward humanity speaks through.

--Daniel David Moses

These are powerful visionary parables of suffering, redemption and retribution...

--The Toronto Star