Alive and Thriving for 50 Years
Founded in 1975 by poets Don McKay and Stan Dragland, Brick Books is marking its 50th anniversary in 2025. Keeping a poetry-only small press not only alive but thriving for fifty years in a capitalist culture is an unlikely feat, and we’re in the mood to celebrate. One of the ways we’ll be celebrating throughout the year is by publishing a series of blogposts by Canadian poets reflecting on titles from our backlist—brilliant and timeless books we’d love readers to take another look at.
The first book we’re highlighting is Moldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick.
In 2017, Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick’s poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. “No one ever thinks they might be the dragon,” Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together, and this is a very good time to revisit it.
Published in 2021, Moldovan Hotel was shortlisted for 2022 Pat Lowther and Raymond Souster Awards and the 2023 Vine Awards and Western Canada Jewish Book Awards. We hope you enjoy this eloquent appreciation by the book’s editor, River Halen.
Moldovan Hotel Appreciation
by River Halen
What most compels me about Leah Horlick’s way of writing is a quality of, not omniscience, but an awareness of and attention to a great multiplicity of perspectives in relation to each event. In Moldovan Hotel, these perspectives are held in dialogue not just within a given time or place, but reaching forwards and backwards in time and across distance. The tactic would be dizzying and disorienting if not for Horlick’s precise orchestral control, weaving the voices into not music but a politic—a clear and motivated body.
The book opens with a chaotic room in which the ancestors of the speaker’s current and past lovers—all of them—meet and interact, and are immediately positioned to harm one another, as well as the speaker’s own ancestors just outside.
As the book progresses, its investigation of the writer’s family history in Romania, where Jewish ancestors escaped or were killed in the Holocaust, is inextricably entangled with the action of bearing witness to the ongoing horrors (dispossession, occupation, genocide) visited on, primarily, Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians, by the U.S., Israel, and other Western powers, sometimes on the very same terrain those Jewish ancestors lived on, as in the case of the CIA’s secret prison in Romania, Bright Light. It is impossible in this book (as I believe it should be anywhere) to talk about the one atrocity without accounting for the many, interlinked others, and this is because of the structure Horlick has set up, in which voices are let in.
Everyone talks to each other in this book—even the microbes! In a poem called “Typhus,” that illness, which spread from the bodies of murdered Jews to infect the Nazis who killed them, encounters the AIDS crisis and is abruptly undone as a symbol of vengeance: “Because I’m gay I don’t believe in disease as metaphor / or punishment,” Horlick asserts.
And whereas the idea and fantasy of “dialogue” is often used to support a vaguely liberal position, wherein one compromises with power and thereby sides with the oppressor, Moldovan Hotel uses the concept very differently, with integrity. Everyone and everything may speak in this book, but the body in which the voices echo has the final word—it assembles all the evidence and moves in a direction; it holds oppressors accountable. In this way Moldovan Hotel offers readers not just a beautifully written, arresting text, but a method for moving forward.
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