Cate, 43, is a university professor in an unfulfilling marriage. When Nuna, the young Inuk woman she mentors, disappears, Cate and her new friend, Isabel, 28, set out on a journey to find her. On the road, their friendship is tested, Nuna remains elusive, and Cate must contend with her ever-demanding husband who wants her to come home. As lead after lead falls through and the search reaches a critical impasse, Cate makes an important decision to stop living for others and finally live life on her own terms. Set in Montreal, Ottawa and Nunavik, Looking for Her explores the intersecting lives of three women in search of themselves. Carolyn Marie Souaid is the Montreal-based author of nine poetry collections and the acclaimed novel, Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik, set in Nunavik (Northern Canada), where she lived and worked for three years in the 1980s. She has performed at literary events in Canada and abroad, her work garnering a top prize at the 2012 Berlin Zebra Poetry Film Festival. Her literary papers (1967-2022) are housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections of McGill University's McLennan Library. About Carolyn Marie Souaid's previous work For Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik "Her language naturally pairs with the physicality of the story ... Unsettling realism is enhanced by Souaid's understanding of the complications of race and complicity." Starred Review, Foreword Reviews "Carolyn Marie Souaid has a brave honest voice and a love for northern Canada and its people that is genuinely moving to read about." Tomson Highway "Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik is the lyrical and absorbing result of a sincere mission to come to grips with another culture. That it took decades to commit to the writing is a tale in itself." Ian McGillis, The Montreal Gazette For This Side of Light (2022) (Poetry) "This carefully edited book lives up to the task of bringing together Souaid's powerful poems into a selected volume...a significant contribution to Canadian literature." Jury Citation, Shortlisted for the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher "Souaid's fearlessness is unapologetic, and offers a courageous worldview, one that doesn't hide from the truth." Montreal Review of Books For The Eleventh Hour (2020) "The Eleventh Hour is deliciously paced and gorgeous. It makes the reader want to slow down and speed up at the same time - to revel in the words and rhythms but also to give in to the narrative thrust of each poem's twists and turns and surprises." The Pacific Rim Review of Books For This World We Invented (2015) "Souaid has her fingers so delicately placed on the pulse of her audience that they hardly notice when she starts to pinch...Not many books of poetry dance like this. Sublime and superb. I would like to use every compliment I can think of. Brilliant." Michael Dennis, Today's Book of Poetry, 2015 For Satie's Sad Piano (2004) "This long poem is perhaps the first serious effort to encompass the nation since Dennis Lee's problematically Ontario centric/Torontonian Civil Elegies appeared in 1968 and 1972." George Elliott Clarke, The Halifax Herald

1970. The FLQ has kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history-a time when army tanks rolled through the streets and bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour. Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award, October is a collection of poetry set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history, a time when army tanks, bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour.October spans three decades of Quebec life, chronicling one woman's attempt to forge some kind of reconciliation between the "warring" cultures, to find the common ground of the French and the English. It is a personal, unabashed look at her own marriage to a French Quebecer which finds her straddling two worlds, two cultures, two very different mentalities. From start to end, echoes of the October Crisis are carefully woven into the text, a constant reminder that the fractious past is never very far behind.

A young woman enters a whole new world of attraction in a community struggling with generations of loss of land and culture. Yasmeen's tradition-bound mother wants her to stay in Montreal, get married, and have babies. But the young Syrian-Canadian wants more. Her appetite for adventure leads her to a teaching job in the northern Quebec village of Saqijuvik. Eager to adopt her new home and its Inuit inhabitants, Yasmeen embraces every experience that comes her way: camping on the tundra, hunting for ptarmigan, sewing with the local women. She plunges into her northern adventure, no holds barred. But it's 1983 and instead of the ideal, pristine Arctic Yasmeen imagined, she uncovers a contradictory world of igloos and pool halls, Sedna and Jesus, raw caribou and alcohol. In the middle of everything is Joanasi, a beautiful but volatile man who leads her into territory that is almost as unsettling as the land itself. Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik is a story of powerful love and potent lust. It is a tale of adventure, of the attempt to bridge worlds and cultures, of self-discovery in the face of the unknown. Set in the vast and beautiful North, it pushes past the standard narrative of southerners bringing "civilization" to a people who have survived in the most unforgiving of environments for over a thousand years. Author: Carolyn Marie Souaid is an award-winning author of seven poetry collections, most recently This World We Invented. She has performed at festivals and literary events in Europe, Canada and the US and her work has been translated into French, Arabic, Spanish and Slovenian. Her poems and short stories have appeared in magazines including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and the Literary Review of Canada, and have been featured on CBC Radio. She lives in Montreal. Reviews "Carolyn Marie Souaid's first novel is rooted in a deep engagement with Inuit culture.... Souaid's layered portrait of [Joanasi] is crucial to the book's ultimate effectiveness... Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik is the lyrical and absorbing result of a sincere mission to come to grips with another culture. That it took decades to commit to the writing is a tale in itself." Ian McGillis, The Montreal Gazette "Souaid's sentences are straightforward and remarkably clear in their depictions. Her language naturally pairs with the physicality of the story ... Indeed, dualities and contrasts are the driving force of the novel. Unsettling realism is enhanced by Souaid's understanding of the complications of race and complicity." Starred Review, Foreword Reviews, (Nov./Dec. 2017)