Transcona Fragments
- Publisher
- Signature Editions
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2002
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781894177115
- Publish Date
- Mar 2002
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
transcona fragments is Jon Paul Fiorentino's second collection of poems. The book's point of departure is the suburban community of Transcona, a railway town that has been stitched to the city of Winnipeg.
The poems move from vivid imagistic fragments that capture the essence of Transcona, to explorations of familial history, to sensitive, self-referential engagement of the "lyric I" – a voice made up of melancholy, anxiety and psychotropic experience. These are poems that offer the reader unique notions of home, memory, and self.
About the author
Jon Paul Fiorentino
Jon Paul Fiorentino’s first novel is Stripmalling (ECW, 2009). His most recent book of poetry is The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006). He is the author of the poetry book Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004) and the humour book Asthmatica (Insomniac Press, 2005). His most recent editorial projects are the anthologies Career Suicide! Contemporary Literary Humour (DC Books, 2003) and Post-Prairie — a collaborative effort with Robert Kroetsch, (Talonbooks, 2005).
Robert Kroetsch
Robert Kroetsch is a Canadian novelist, poet, and non-fiction writer. In his novel, The Words of My Roaring (1966), he began to use the tall tale rhetoric of prairie taverns. Both The Studhorse Man (1969), which won the Governor General’s Award, and Gone Indian (1973) call the conventions of realistic fiction hilariously into question.
In 2004, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Excerpt: Transcona Fragments (by (author) Jon Paul Fiorentino)
transcona fragments
ah, good old ground tasting like invasive snow salt reeling under exhaust (no matter the cost) and don't forget to write from the east where you will sit in a state of abandoned bliss stitched to a street that hardly knows you
unpacking that metaphor the unkempt gravel or tar of a transcona side street driving with your third eye on the road splaying yourself out the side window, with both eyes on what you know
that taste, that region: gravel, tar, spit leaves of glass splinters on the dream road tin am radio chevrolet and a block heater and an electric blanket and a six pack for christmas
park on the frigid plain, dig a ditch round the city plunge into floodway and dream headlong into traffic as if you had the guts as if you ever had the pleasure
under windows laced with the thickest frost you ramble on about the weather and the family and i'm almost lured into your language until i recoil at the irrational flash of a police search light
we quickly clothe ourselves and turn down the heater and turn up the radio and pretend to be innocents with decorative smiles for the constable who was hoping for something more cinematic
Editorial Reviews
“transcona fragments is a poetic disavowal, a landscape stripped of pretense. We are left wandering the streets of Transcona, terrified and strangely free. Fiorentino is 21st Century Beat, a Canadian Ginsberg ranting and restless.”
—Robert Budde
