Sonia Di Placido’s attunement to language’s surfaces and dark interiors animates landscapes of Protestant Ontario through Mediterranean sensuality and warmth. Her attention shines in starkly compressed words, the (dis)ordered values of sympathetic, creative judgement. Di Placido’s plumb line reaches for impossible depths, a sign of extraordinary resilience, artistic dream, and curiosity for the contradictory realities apposing our world now.

Flesh is a book of shimmering skins. Its poems explore the material afterlife of our surfaces, reveal how we and the world we encounter, “carving [ … ] sight and sense,” are surface all the way down. Flesh itself is a body luminous, writhing, gristled, brilliant and singing. In her moonlit poetry of spines, pelts, and pulp, Di Placido’s work is an offering: “I give you words in all of my skins—”

Flesh is an out-of-body/in-body, shapeshifting experience that both delights and astonishes. These trailblazing poems are unpredictable, bold, unsettling and edged with wonder. Sonia Di Placido has penned a brilliant opus. A sizzling and tender foray into disillusionment, madness, “the cult of culture” and the unquenchable thirst to belong. In Flesh, Di Placido has created a “hands on world,” an enchantment of poems, not to be missed.

Di Placido favours an elliptical yet sensuous lyric foregrounded by irreverent etymological play