Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas

A diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion.

In this powerful and deeply personal collection, Gloria Blizzard uses traditional narrative essays, hybrid structures, and the tools of poetry to negotiate the complexities of culture, geography, and language in an international diasporic quest.

These essays of wayfinding accompany anyone exploring issues of belonging -- to a family, a neighbourhood, a group, or a country. Here, the small is profound, the intimate universal; the questions are all relevant and the answers of our times require simultaneous multiple perspectives.

Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages, living on the Indigenous lands of the Americas. Her essays, reviews, and poetry have been published widely. She has an MFA from the University of King’s College and currently resides in Toronto.