"I was fortunate to love you in my heart." Vancouver's venerable, ivy-covered Sylvia Hotel, famed haunt of artists, writers, and lovers, provides the setting for this series of deeply personal reflections on the matter of unrequited love. Eloquent and aphoristic in expression, worldly-wise in tone, and laden with feeling, every one of these masterful poems will speak to, and for, all who have lived "close to the lip of ecstasy and despair" and "cannot / wash the truth out of themselves." Melancholy, forbearing, wistful, and irrepressibly witty, The Sylvia Hotel Poems is a sustained triumph of style, of character, and of human understanding.

A.F. Moritz has published more than twenty collections of poetry as well as important works of literary history and numerous translations of Latin American verse. A leading figure in the literary life of Canada, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a major award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Two of his most recent works have reaffirmed his reputation: Night Street Repairs (2004) received the ReLit Award and The Sentinel (2008) won both the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Toronto.

George Fetherling's profile page