Sugar
Steve Szewczok
About the Author
Steve Szewczok stems from the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada. With a background in theatre and music, Steve has performed in over 50 theatrical productions as well as working in radio and film and writing for the theatre. Steve currently lives in Montreal with his two children and works on the production side of the film industry. Sugar is Steve's debut book of poetry. He is currently working on his second collection of poems.
A memory piece served up in sequence, Sugar is a fifty part, long-form poem which tells the story of one woman's struggle with her own vices. Though Sugar contains the themes of drug abuse, alcoholism, and hardcore sexuality, they are used to explore the human condition, in particular ideas on loss, and how one copes with the solitude of heartbreak.
Sugar is in fact a love story that asks the important questions: Where do people go when they leave you? How small can love get?
ISBN 978-0-9855577-1-3
68 pages
$14.95
5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound, paper
Excerpt
The Catalyst
I remember the taste of floor wax
Tiny splinters in my small hands
Kept me from praying that night
I knew then God was useless to me
I knew then He was gone
I remember the sound of my father’s voice
He was a musician a singer a composer
He sang to me of a loss
I could not understand
His rough music
His intonations
I was a child
I was alone at nine
My sister and me
She was four
I loved her so much
Our mother moved us far away
A new start
A new life
I felt like a fugitive
As if I had done
Something wrong
Something criminal
It was my fault wasn’t it?
I was the catalyst
Reviews
“Steve Szewczok, with this work, fearlessly goes into the darkest recesses of human despair and explores, with a brutal honesty, the choices the abused, forgotten and lost make to simply survive. 'Sugar' is a brilliant character work which reaches out and touches us, un-apologetically, in all of the soft tissues we have from past bruising. “
—William Marshe, author of salt/ /water
"Sugar is, all at once, beautiful, startling and mysterious. These slivers of a tortured life linger in the mind like borrowed memories."
—Ed Macdonald, author of Spat the Dummy
“My introduction to Sugar was casual. Steve had visited me at my home in Stratford and casually mentioned some “poems” he was working on, leaving them on my dining room table on his return to Montreal. I picked the pages from the table and my relationship with Sugar was no longer casual. I was stunned by their power, beautiful starkness and complexity; by their ‘life’. I feel ardent about these poems and privileged to know the artist.”
—Brian McKay, theatre professional and teacher