Class Clown

More punk than prog, neither light nor overweight, the verse in Pino Coluccio’s second book hews to the classic themes of love, death and the passage of time, while presenting a cast of longers and losers whose admirable stubborn pluck is also at times tragic. A collection that above all champions that highest of human art forms: clowning around.

AUTHOR

Pino Coluccio

Pino Coluccio’s poems have appeared in The Walrus and three anthologies. His first collection, First Comes Love, came out in 2005. He lives in Toronto.

Reviews

Winner of the 2018 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Praise for Class Clown

“[Coluccio] writes short, witty poems about love, death, and the absurdities of modern life…. I kept going back to [Class Clown] over and over and over again.” —CBC’s Sunday Edition

“Coluccio proves that light verse isn’t necessarily lightweight.” —Toronto Star Praise for Pino Coluccio

“Like those comedians who reveal painful family secrets for laughs, you’ll have a hard time catching Pino Coluccio at one of his many rhyming bluffs. With a free-ranging and irreverent mix of high and low, and showing a splendid gift for satire and biting portraiture, Coluccio writes an unflinching, crisply-constructed poetry that wears its sad truths lightly—though they sting no less for it.” —Carmine Starnino