Abstract
When Kirk Ramdath was a child, his mother came from Trinidad to Calgary to give her family a life of greater opportunity than the one she left behind. Love in a Handful of Dust, his first book, is in many ways the fulfillment of that opportunity. Though in its romance, it might seem to be far away from the conservative values of the world he came from, in its extended riffs on sex, politics, faith, on ecstacy – not the drug, but the feeling surging up from an excess of the sensual, the emotional, the poetic, it is, in many ways, a thank-you love poem to his mother, and a man’s understanding of the meaning of the women in his life.