Audio: Adam’s Prophet
Adam Sol interviewed by Christine Fischer Guy

In the latest Bookninja Magazine “podcast”, we look at Adam Sol’s third book of poems, Jeremiah, Ohio, a road novel in poems that features the doomed prophet Jeremiah and his sidekick, the bread-truck-driving, grad-school-dropout Bruce. Sol riffs on the Biblical Jeremiah to create a modern prophet who is as engaging as he is delusional; whose song is, in the words of the hapless Bruce, “warped music/something necessary and unique.”

Christine Fischer Guy catches up with Sol over coffee in Toronto to talk about tackling a novelist’s challenges in a book of poems, the lure of writing eccentric characters, and the necessity of prophets in the post-911 world.

Adam Sol Interview
(13:12) (5.8mb)
(This is an audio mp3 file — please save it to your local drive (c:\, etc.) if you plan on listening to it more than once. It will save us the bandwidth. Right click, or click hold for Mac users, and choose “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” or whatever comes up that looks like that, and save it somewhere where you know how to get to it. Luddite.)

Adam Sol grew up in Connecticut and attended universities in Boston, Indiana, and Cincinnati.  He has published three books of poetry, including Jonah’s Promise (MidList Press, 2000) and Crowd of Sounds (Anansi 2003), which won Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry in 2004.  He is also the author of numerous essays and reviews for publications as various as The Globe and Mail, The Forward, and Critique.  His most recent book is Jeremiah, Ohio, a novel in poems published by House of Anansi Press.  He is an Assistant Professor of English at Laurentian University, Georgian College, and lives in Toronto with his wife, Rabbi Yael Splansky, and their three sons. (photo credit: Barbara Stoneham)

Christine Fischer Guy is a Toronto writer whose work has appeared in numerous national magazines and newspapers including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, and Books in Canada. Her fiction most recently appeared in the January 2009 issue of Prairie Fire and she has a story forthcoming for
Descant.