In his latest book of stories Len Gasparini holds a broken mirror up to reality to reveal the shattered shards of vivid characters with grace and precision. The stories in When Does A Kiss Become a Bite? are Chekhovian in scope, eloquent statements, strikingly rendered, executed with dark tenderness and hypnotic conviction. Gasparini writes with a rough, seductive charm of the private loneliness of Tennessee Williams, of a couple of rounders on a wild ride to New Orleans, of a nightworker consumed by Gothic fear and self-loathing, of a Poe scholar, finding his Annabel Lee, but, like Poe, ending in the gutter. An authentic narrative impulse drives each of the ten stories, as if Nelson Algren and O. Henry, after a night of serious drinking, collaborated until they wrote as one.

Born in Windsor, Ontario, Len Gasparini is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, five short-story collections, including The Snows of Yesteryear (2011), The Undertaker's Wife (,2007), and A Demon in My View (2003), which was translated into French as Nouvelle noirceur. He has also written two children’s books, a work of non-fiction, and a one-act play. In 1990, he was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. In 2010, he won the NOW Open Poetry Stage event. Having lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New Orleans, and Washington State, he now divides his time between Toronto and his hometown. Mirror Image, his latest collection, combines poetry and prose.

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