City Poems

From the Preface by A.F. Moritz: Joe Fiorito’s powerful City Poems is new with the freshness of sudden light on what was always beside us, but we became dulled to it, or turned away: it was too constantly troubling, too difficult. Searing in subject matter, profound in meaning and sympathy, the poems are also wonderfully inventive and skillful in poetic form, while remaining casual, colloquial: the art of the street’s voice. They’re very short: shooting stars. But they constitute pinpoint windows on vast regions, unknown or ignored worlds: struggling people, obscurely dying people, their full reality: the body-and-soul details of pain and loss, endurance, heroism, joys, ugliness and beauty, in the rough corners, wastelands, and crevices where insulted, injured life manages to persist amid the expanse of glass, steel, and money.

Joe Fiorito is a journalist who has worked as a city columnist for the Montreal Gazette, Globe and Mail, National Post and the Toronto Star newspapers. He won the National Newspaper Award for Columns in 1995, the Brassani Prize for Short Fiction in 2000, and the City of Toronto Book Award in 2003. He has lived and worked in Thunder Bay, Iqaluit, Regina and Montreal and has made his home in Toronto since 1997.