Port of Being

Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award
Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Longlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry

Voyeurism and fact go head to head in Port of Being, a debut book of poetry that mines speech from the city streets and the internet. These are poems set firmly on the threshold of the private and public, the future-haunted and the real, forging the human adrift in a terrain of space junk, drones, and addiction. Port of Being speaks just in time, navigating the worlds of surveillance, migration, and money, only to carve a way into intimacy and connection.

"Ramji has created an insightful, thoughtful, engaging and inspiring guide to being in the digital age."—Hamilton Review of Books

"These poems convey a tense, compelling vigilance.”—Toronto Star

"In equal measures, this book is bioluminescent, galactic, humane. Daring and intimate, it holds worlds.”—Dani Couture, author of Listen Before Transmit