City Poems

By Joe Fiorito

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Exile Editions
• Release date: Apr 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781550967715

Joe Fiorito

Joe Fiorito was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As a young man in Northern Ontario, he worked in a paper mill, surveyed roads, and laboured in bush camps prior to becoming involved in community development and arts consulting. Fiorito spent five years working with a staff of Inuit journalists at CBC Radio in Iqaluit, NWT before transferring to Regina, where he wrote, produced and directed CBC Radio's highly acclaimed "The Food Show," a weekly program about food and agriculture. Fiorito lived for many years in Montreal, where he first wrote a weekly food column for HOUR, and later signed on as a city columnist for the Montreal Gazette. His first collection, Comfort Me With Apples: Considering the Pleasures of the Table, a series of essays about food and memory drawn from Fiorito's HOUR columns, was published by Nuage Editions (now Signature Editions) in 1994. In 2000, it was reissued by McLelland & Stewart. Tango on the Main, Fiorito's second collection with Signature, was selected from his Gazette columns. Fiorito relocated to Toronto, writing first for the National Post and then for the Toronto Star. In 1999, he published his family memoir, The Closer We Are to Dying, which became a national best-seller and received widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the award-winning novel The Song Beneath the Ice and Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto.

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Formatting note:

In the electronic versions of this book blank pages that appear in the paperback have been removed.

CITY POEMS

JOE FIORITO

PREFACE BY A.F. MORITZ

Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Translation, Drama and Graphic Books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Fiorito, Joe, 1948-, author

City poems / Joe Fiorito ; preface by A.F. Moritz.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55096-770-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55096-771-5 (EPUB).--

ISBN 978-1-55096-772-2 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-773-9 (PDF)

I. Moritz, A. F., writer of preface. II. Title.

PS8651.I59C58 2018 C811'.6 C2018-900939-X / C2018-900940-3

Copyright © Joe Fiorito, 2018

Preface copyright © A.F. Moritz, 2018

Design and composition by Michael Callaghan

Cover photo © Joe Fiorito, 2018

Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2018. All rights reserved

We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

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because not even the landlady

could remember their names.

—The Fire in the Tenement

Raymond Souster, 1921- 2015

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CITY POEMS

Silent Night on Clarence Square

Moby-Dick

Kevington

Him, and Crack

His Friend Died in the Fire

Her Cracked Lips

sk8rgrl

An Old Queen Recalls (1)

I Go Out on a Party

The Day He Flew

Adam, Eve

I Get It Now

Albino’s House

An Old Queen Recalls (2)

He Also Smelled of Lysol

Birthday Present

Buda at the Elgin

Church St. Vernissage

Daphne Bakes a Cake

Brickworks: Dead Dog Day

A Worker’s Lament

Dunn Ave. (1)

Dunn Ave. (2)

Ed’s Tree

Judy and the Fortune Teller

FTP

He Could Be a Winner

The Hoarder

Him, at the Dentist

Dunn’s Ode to Joy

How the Fire Started

Jahman and the Street Nurse