All Violet

The posthumous poetry journal of Rani Rivera, Toronto's champion of mental health advocacy and harm reduction. In All Violet, a young woman chronicles the experience of living on the margins, in spaces and places where body and mind are flayed by guilt, disappointments and betrayals. Her poems record the shattering trauma of struggling to survive through periods of doubt, fear, rage and pain, creating a narrative of disconnection, indignation, alienation and emptiness, the extremes of suffering and desperation. Employing lyrical free verse, Rani Rivera has skillfully employed the short line to pinpoint moments of acute perception. Unadorned, taut and precise cries of pain, loss and fury draw the reader deeper and deeper inside this in-your-face confrontation with a dark world of foreboding alleviated by flashes of mordant wit and grace under fire.

After studying at the University of Toronto, where she majored in English, poet Rani Rivera worked as a community coordinator at Progress Place while she herself was living on the margins, struggling with trauma, past addiction and depression. This legacy of poems, All Violet, was discovered after her death among her papers.