“In her collection of poems and short prose The Weight of Survival Tina Biello uses small sentences to collect and honour her thoughts on some very big subjects: small-town queerness, curses and blessings, death and the afterlife, leaving and arriving, family recipes and the recipe of a family. I had to stop every few pages and use a bright pink highlighter to mark the lines I knew I would need to return to in order to navigate through things like the loss of a parent’s ordered mind, the memory of the smell of a departed grandmother, the empty space on a pillow of a lover-no-more. This is poetry that can help you with all of these things.”

—Ivan Coyote

“Chronicling her family’s journey from their ancestral home in sun-drenched Casacalenda to the cloud-covered region of Cowichan complete with curses as companions and proverbs as memory portals, The Weight of Survival serves as another cherished collection of poems by Tina Biello. Lush with vivid language and crafted with care in capturing the cadence of Molise’s disappearing dialect, Biello’s writing brims with love, honours grief, and thrums with an enduring heartbeat shaped by the diasporic existence.”

—Eufemia Fantetti