Concetta Principe's deeply intimate Walking explores religious difference and secular politics, God and promises through the meditative lens of prose poetry. Walking occurs in the mind through dreams, in memory and as a relentless process of bearing witness to the earthly, quotidian activities that challenge super-natural abstractions. As the unconverted pilgrim of the book eats nothing, she is led through these poems into encounters with God, birds, stones, and other humans who inhabit the stairways and closed doors of Jerusalem. Together, this collection of prose poems functions as a revelatory maze of mystery and discovery.

Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on the impact of the secular unconscious on culture and political thought. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. Her essays, “Who Shot Meriwether Lewis?” was long-listed for the 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award at The New Quarterly, and “I Title it ‘Suicide Letter’” was short-listed for The Malahat Review 2019 Constance Rooke award. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. Her collection, Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide, is available from Gordon Hill Press. Her academic monograph exploring trauma in contemporary secular thought, Secular Messiahs and the Return to Paul’s Real: A Lacanian Approach, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham.

Concetta Principe's profile page

Compelling. Heart wrenching. Concetta Principe'sWalking: Not a Nun's Diarygrabbed me and would not let me go. Today's book of poetry would tell you that grace under pressure is where the hardest gems are formed. Principe is a flaneur in the Michael Herr fashion and these poems are like punches to the stomach, little bombs that you can't avoid, arrows straight to the heart. -- Michael Dennis, Today's book of poetry