Joe Rosenblatt

The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rosenblatt was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, where he grew up in the city's Kensington Market area and attended Lansdowne Public School. In 1956 he became a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway. A socialist, he became a Trotskyist, joining the Socialist Education League in Toronto. He ran in the 1958 municipal election, for city council in Ward 1 (Riverdale), receiving 521 votes. He began seriously writing poetry in the early 1960s. "He became interested in writing through his association with the worker poet Milton Acorn in the early sixties and the metaphysical poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen." Rosenblatt died on March 11, 2019, shortly after advance reviews of his newest poetry collection Bite Me! Musings on Monsters and Mayhem began to appear in media. ==Recognition==

A 1976 book of selected poems, Top Soil, won Rosenblatt the Governor General's Award in 1976. A decade later, another book of selected poems, Poetry Hotel, won him the B.C. Book Prize for Poetry (now the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) in 1986. "Rosenblatt has been writer in residence at several Canadian universities, as well as the University of Rome and the University of Bologna." "Several bilingual volumes of his poetry have been published in Italian with translations by Prof. Alfredo Rizzardi of the University of Bologna, and Ada Donati of Rome" (one being a book of his sea sonnets, A Tentacled Mother). "His poems have also been ... translated into French, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish." ==Publications==

Poetry • The LSD Leacock. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1966. • Winter of the Luna Moth. House of Anansi, Toronto, 1968 • Bumblebee Dithyramb. Press Porcepic, Erin 1970 • Blind Photographer. Press Porcepic, Erin, 1974 • Dream Craters. Press Porcepic, Erin, 1975 • Virgins & Vampires. McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1975 • Top Soil, Selected Poems (1962–1975). Press Porcepic, Erin, 1976 • Loosely Tied Hands. Black Moss Press, Windsor, 1978 • The Sleeping Lady. Exile Editions, Toronto, 1980 • Brides of the Stream. Oolichan Books, Lantzville, B.C., 1983 • Poetry Hotel, Selected Poems (1963-1985). McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1985 • A Tentacled Mother. (in the original plus new sonnets) Exile Editions, Toronto, Oct. 1995 • The Rosenblatt Reader. (selected poems and prose, 1962–1995) Exile Editions, Toronto, 1995. • The Voluptuous Gardener. (new poetry and selected drawings from Carleton University Art Gallery permanent collection) Beach Holme Press, Vancouver, 1996. • Parrot fever. collages by Michel Christensen. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2002. • The lunatic muse, Joe Rosenblatt; edited by David Berry. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2007. • Dog, Joe Rosenblatt & Catherine Owen; photos by Karen Moe. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2008. • Bite Me! Musings on Monsters and Mayhem, The Porcupine's Quill, 2019. Fiction • Tommy Fry & the Ant Colony. Black Moss, Windsor, 1970 • Escape From the Glue Factory. (autobiographical fiction) Exile Editions, Toronto, 1985 • The Kissing Goldfish of Siam. (autobiographical fiction) Exile Editions, Toronto, 1989 • Beds & Consenting Dreamers. (an experimental novel) Oolichan Books, Lantzville, B.C. 1994 Except where noted, bibliographic information courtesy University of Toronto. ==See also==