2022 Raymond Souster Award Shortlist * 2022 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Shortlist

Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.

In 2017, Leah 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.