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Poetry Canadian

All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been

by (author) Joe Fiorito

Publisher
Vehicule Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2020
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781550655469
    Publish Date
    Apr 2020
    List Price
    $17.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781550655520
    Publish Date
    Apr 2020
    List Price
    $12.99

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Description

All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been, Joe Fiorito's second collection, establishes him as the preeminent chronicler of people in extremis. Drawing on the precison and unsentimentality that have become hallmarks of his poetry, Fiorito creates uncompromising mini-narratives about addiction, failed rehabs, incarceration, demeaning jobs, and homelessness; much of it derived from nearly two decades spent as a newspaper columnist covering daily life on Toronto's streets. In poem after poem, Fiorito's exact word choices, cold-eyed details, and crisp internal rhymes mete out moments both beautiful and harrowing: "her little finger curls a bit/she cut a tendon when she slit/ her wrist; she'd clenched/ her fist." All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been is a moving exploration of brokeness by one of Canada's most indispensable writers.

About the author

Joe Fiorito was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As a young man in Northern Ontario, he worked in a paper mill, surveyed roads, and laboured in bush camps prior to becoming involved in community development and arts consulting. Fiorito spent five years working with a staff of Inuit journalists at CBC Radio in Iqaluit, NWT before transferring to Regina, where he wrote, produced and directed CBC Radio's highly acclaimed "The Food Show," a weekly program about food and agriculture. Fiorito lived for many years in Montreal, where he first wrote a weekly food column for HOUR, and later signed on as a city columnist for The Montreal Gazette. His first collection, Comfort Me with Apples: Considering the Pleasures of the Table, a series of essays about food and memory drawn from Fiorito's HOUR columns,  was published by Nuage Editions (now Signature Editions) in 1994. In 2000, it was  reissued by McLelland & Stewart. Tango on the Main, Fiorito's second collection, was selected from his Gazette columns.Fiorito relocated to Toronto, writing first for The National Post and then for The Toronto Star. In 1999, he published his family memoir, The Closer We Are to Dying (M&S), which became a national best-seller and received widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the award-winning novel The Song Beneath the Ice (M&S, 2003) and Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto. (M&S, 2007).

Joe Fiorito's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, City of Toronto Book Award
  • Winner, Brassani Prize for Short Fiction
  • Winner, National Newspaper Award for Columns

Editorial Reviews

"Fiorito's poems are...wonderfully inventive and skillful in poetic form, while remaining casual, colloquial: the art of the street's voice."--A.F Moritz
"How does Joe Fiorito do it? The mixture of toughness, elegance and lethal wit. The street-smart, bruising tenderness packed into language sharper than flint." -Mark Abley