“BOOKS AND BISCOTTI” EVENT CELEBRATES NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Sunday, April 14, 2013 - 2:00pm

Dante Club
1330 London Road
Sarnia, ON
N7S 6A8

Three well-known Italian Canadian poets from Toronto as well as two award-winning poets from Lambton County will present new work as part of a National Poetry Month celebration planned for “Books and Biscotti”, Sunday, April 14, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Dante Club, 1330 London Road (side entrance hall) in Sarnia.

Guest readers include: Toronto publisher and Guernica Editions co-owner Michael Mirolla, poet/author/performer/artist Sonia Di Placido and Len Gasparini, a 2010 winner of the NOW Open Poetry Stage event plus Lambton County poets Debbie Okun Hill, an Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Reserve recipient and Lynn Tait, first prize winner of The Ontario Poetry Society 2012 Arborealis Contest. Four of the featured poets are members of the League of Canadian Poets, a professional organization for established and emerging poets.

Mirolla, the editor-in-chief of Guernica Editions, will be reading from his new collection of short stories: The Giulio Metaphysics III as well as promoting his Bressani Prize winning novel Berlin, his poetry collection Light and Time and his short story collection The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian as La logical formal dell emotion).

Di Placido will be reading from Exaltation in Cadmium Red, a body of poems that “revels in this fanatical, fantastic colour to express the heights and depths of passion — engaging in meditations on prayer, spirituality, feminism, and the breadth of existence in a post-colonial, trans-national and transsexual age.”

Gasparini will be reading new poems from a forthcoming book titled Mirror Image.

The afternoon will also include the Sarnia launch of EnCompass 1 (Beret Days Press): a poetry anthology featuring the work of Tait, Okun Hill and three other Canadian poets: Bernice Lever (British Columbia), Jan Wood (Saskatchewan) and Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews (Ontario). Okun Hill and Tait will read their award-winning work as well as several selections from the anthology.

This free community presentation is hosted by the Dante Club in conjunction with the Italo-Canadian Cultural Club/Laziali di Sarnia and the Association of Italian Canadian Writers (AICW).