Raymond Souster is best known for his short poems portraying Toronto street scenes and for his deceptively casual language and tone. During the 1950s and 1960s he was a close friend of the Montreal poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, and he collaborated with Dudek and Peter Miller in the founding and operating of Contact Press, the most significant Canadian small press of the 1950s.

Souster was born in Toronto in 1921 to lower-middle-class parents; his father, Austin Souster, was a clerk in the Canadian Bank of Commerce; his mother was the former Norma Baker. As a child Souster was an outstanding pitcher in bantam and juvenile baseball leagues, but on graduation from high school he took a clerking job with the Imperial Bank of Canada (later the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) where he worked for forty-five years. In 1941 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, hoping...