The Imagining Toronto project is pleased to announce the release of Urban TEXTures: Imaginative Renderings of Toronto, a limited edition chapbook featuring poetry and prose contributions by seventeen young Toronto-area Geographers who have spent the past four months engaging with the city and its literature in Imagining Toronto, a senior undergraduate course at York University.

The selections in Urban TEXTures are wide-ranging but coalesce around representations of a city experienced by young people with original urban insights. The pieces are alternately suburban and central, humorous and sombre, unadorned and richly metaphorical. Some, like Tyler Starzynski's "So we Decided to Buy some Liquor" , Kris Bellissimo's "T.O., Truthfully" and Alessandro Vescio's "A Night to Remember", offer young men's voices infused with bravado and a love of action. Others, including Aisha Ahmed's "Rooster that Woke Me up to the City" and Rob Halko's "News to Kween's Music" are simultaneously humorous and subversive. Kelly Falcioni's "My Map to the City", Theresa Ip's "Any Other Street" and Alessandra Caschera's "Lead" map loss movingly across the city's streetscapes. Stephanie Nunes' "Underground" aptly characterizes the jarring sense of vertigo and separation of subway travel, a motif explored along frozen pathways in Shakib Khan's "Fear". Liza Badaloo's "The Dollar" lyrically choreographs an altercation with racism, classism, and sexism at the corner of Bloor and Spadina. May Chew's beautifully phrased "Untitled" renders the city a labyrinth at once concrete and corporeal, while Laura Hatcher's "Lansdowne Avenue" conjures light and darkness along a perilous strip. Katherine Rudzik's "Towering" and Angela Valle's "Silent All These Years" inquire into the architectural and cultural sources of the city's identity. Finally, Carmela Beninato's "Five Sense Experience of Toronto" and Jessica DeSantis' "The City Escape" invoke a Toronto ripe with colours, sounds, and smells and offer sensorial walking tours of the city.

The seventeen young geographers who have contributed to Urban TEXTures are something more than poets. They are engaged chroniclers of a city in flux, a city at once optimistic about and hostile to the kinds of difference and diversity their lives signify. Their voices infuse the city with an unfiltered veracity, a glimpse of the real, imagined city.

If you would like to receive a copy of Urban TEXTures, please contact Amy Lavender Harris via e-mail at alharris@yorku.ca. Alternatively, please send a large stamped, self-addressed envelope plus $2.50 to Imagining Toronto c/o 209 Gilmour Avenue, Toronto, Ontario. M6P 3B2.