| Québécité George Elliott Clarke 2003 / Poetry / $39.95 9781894031752 / Fine / 112 pp Edition is out of print George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité is a three-act multicultural romance set in modern-day Québec. It tells the story of two interracial couples whose blossoming relationships expose the perils and possibilities of loving across racial and cultural lines. Québécité is an expanded, poetic rendering of a libretto George Elliott Clarke wrote at the request of the Guelph Jazz Festival, with music composed by Juno award-winning pianist D.D. Jackson. The opera will debut in Guelph during this year’s festival (September 3 to 7) with a cast including Haydain Neale, Kiran Ahluwalia, Yoon Choi and Dean Bowman. As Clarke writes in his prelude: “This libretto is for connoisseurs. Its stanzas were sculpted of the aggravated gravitas of Miles Davis’s trumpet, the scalacious solace of James Brown’s howls, the fearless laissez-faire of Oscar Peterson’s piano, and the oceanic négritude of Portia White’s contralto. I confess: it is also a callaloo confection—or gumbo concoction—of Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953) and films by Marcel Camus, Jacques Demy and Mira Nair. Given these traditions, plus my own tendencies, eccentricities, affinities—lugubrious, lubricious, lubricated—this production accepts that History is a slaughterhouse, Poetry is an opera house, and that only Love allows us to distinguish Beauty from its exinguishing.” “Opera has always been about grand-scale gestures, about excess, about staging the spectacular. Throw jazz into the mix and what you get is [. . ] a gumbo concoction: one where hope and imagination rainbow over orthodoxy, where improvisation and the capacity to dream reinvigorate our commitment to new understandings of identity, belonging, and collective social responsibility.” —Ajay Heble in the Canadian Theatre Review Review: “Québécité consists of heavy themes treated in an uplifting plot, in verse suited for jazz fans and lovers of language.” Kelly Murphy, Montreal Review of Books Is a special edition of the book: 9781894031745 | Other Books by this Author |  | White George Elliott Clarke 2021 / Canadian Poetry / $29.95 CAN 9781554472307 / Trade paper / 256 pp |  | The Merchant of Venice (Retried) George Elliott Clarke 2017 / Poetry / $19.95 CAN 9781554471713 / Trade paper / 64 pp |  | Gold George Elliott Clarke 2016 / Poetry / $21.95 CAN 9781554471577 / Trade paper / 160 pp |  | Black George Elliott Clarke 2012 / Poetry / $21.95 CAN 9781554471034 / Trade paper / 152 pp |  | Blue George Elliott Clarke 2011 / Poetry / $21.95 CAN 9781554470990 / Trade paper / 176 pp |  | Red George Elliott Clarke 2011 / Poetry / $19.95 CAN 9781554470983 / Trade paper / 160 pp |  | Whylah Falls George Elliott Clarke 2010 / Poetry / $21.95 CAN 9781554470952 / Trade paper / 208 pp |  | Execution Poems George Elliott Clarke 2009 / Poetry / $14.95 CAN 9781554470815 / Trade paper / 48 pp |  | Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path George Elliott Clarke 2007 / Poetry / $21.95 CAN 9781554470372 / Trade paper / 128 pp |  | Québécité George Elliott Clarke 2003 / Poetry / $18.95 CAN 9781894031745 / Trade paper / 112 pp |  | Africadian History: An Exhibition Catalogue George Elliott Clarke 2001 / Poetry / $4.95 CAN 9781894031523 / Pamphlet / 16 pp |  | Execution Poems George Elliott Clarke 2001 / Poetry / $12.95 CAN 9781894031486 / Trade paper / 48 pp |
