This Way Home

This book contains selections from Gianna Patriarca’s previously published poetry books, as well as a number of new poems. It is a collection written by a woman in a time when the support and the encouragement was as limited as visibility. In many ways it is a collection of verses written as an act of survival and acknowledgement of existence.

AUTHOR

Gianna Patriarca

Gianna Patriarca’s publications include seven books of poetry and one children’s book. Her first collection, Italian Women and Other Tragedies, was runner-up to the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award and in 2009 was translated into Italian and launched at the university of Bologna and Naples. My Etruscan Face was short listed for the Bressani Literary Award in 2009. Her work has been extensively anthologized and has been adapted for Canada Stage Theater and for CBC radio drama. Gianna’s books appear on the course list of Canadian, American and Italian universities She lives and works in Toronto.

Reviews

Gianna Patriarca’s selected and new work attests to the rare capability of some poetry to lead you to the right place, where you are supposed to go. Vulnerable yet powerful. Intimate and familiar.

Patriarca’s verses transcend the particular and reveal a universal story of linguistic displacement, physical displacement, social struggles, and alienation with the joys of living “life as theatre” in a community with one’s food, belief, and heritage culture. Her poems speak to all immigrants who want their faces to be recognized. This Way Home is essential for understanding la storia di Canada.

Gianna Patriarca has contributed decades of intense and inspiring poetry to the Canadian literary landscape. She writes about the passion of immigrant communities, anger, love, the rough broken skin of workers’ hands, fierce young women who defy their fathers’ belts and ultimately the practicality of survival. Patriarca offers us hauntingly powerful poems with a spirited humour and a full heart.

Gianna Patriarca has written deeply human poetry about the world and people around her. Her work is warm, compassionate, bitter, gentle — like that of the southern Italian socialist poet, Rocco Scotellaro, whom we both admire — full of insights, hard truths and love of family and friends. With this wonderful collection Patriarca should now take up her deserved place as a major Canadian poet.

Gianna Patriarca’s work has the power to speak clearly and loudly to all generations. Her poems are a friendly exhortation to taste the bitter and the sweet. I find true genius in how skillfully Patriarca articulates and renders universally intelligible the thoughts and feelings of particular fragments of her experience. I quite simply love her work.