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Photo: Stephen Payne
Author website
A. F. MORITZ (Canada)

A. F. Moritz’s poetry has received various awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Beth Hokin Prize of Poetry. His most recent book, Night Street Repairs (House of Anansi Press, 2004) won the 2005 ReLit Award for poetry. Other recent books are biographies of Emma Goldman that won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize in Canadian Jewish History, and of Stephen Leacock, both co-authored with Theresa Moritz.

Born in Warren, Ohio, Moritz received a BA (Journalism) and a Ph.D. (English) from Marquette University, Milwaukee, and in 1970-73 was the weekly film columnist of the Milwaukee Sentinel. Since coming to Toronto in 1974, he has worked as an advertising copywriter and executive, as an editor and publisher, and has held various teaching positions at the University of Toronto.

“Several species of dramatic monologue balance Moritz’s frequent use of a vatic voice, and his quiet, harmonious or sensory poems contextualize his two favoured modes. Across these stylistic boundaries, Moritz cultivates his taste for the surreal, even the grotesque, and draws on the associative license of visions or dreams. In the vatic poems, the surreal and associative bristle with metaphors, while in the dramatic poems they often project the inner working of the speaker’s mind. Moritz’s visionary surrealism conveys a kind of poetic intoxication, a willingness to give the motion of the mind over to the object of attention that undermines any implication of hubris in his elevated tones. This seems to be the nexus of Moritz’s versatility.”  
Chris Jennings, Canadian Literature (Canada)

AVAILABLE PUBLICATION
Sound of Hungry Animals
by A.F. Moritz (Canada)
with drawings by Rudolf Kurz (Canada)


Spring 2008
poetry | chapbook | 42 pp. | 6 3/4 x 12 3/4| limited edition of 125
978-0-9552904-4-2 (UK)   
$65.00 CAN | €45.00 EUR | £35.00 GBP
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