All My Fallen Angelas

By Gianna Patriarca

All My Fallen Angelas is a collection of stories inspired by the lives of Italian-Canadian women living in Toronto from the 1960s to the present. The stories document their strength and resilience, their power and vulnerability as the women move in community that allowed their presence in shops, factories, and churches, but offered them little else for entertainment and self-exploration outside of their families. The stories cover a wide range of women’s experiences from loneliness; disappointment; mothering; marriages, arranged and not arranged, that were loving, simply stable, or violent. As a whole, the book provides the reader with a sense of Toronto’s Italian immigrant community in its urban landscape, housing, social life, work and education options. The stories are the work of a raconteur who has been listening carefully to a wide range of women who shared their feelings in the kitchens and basements of their lives when the men were not around, when they were asleep or otherwise occupied. Each story ends on an ambiguous or poignant note that invokes the reader’s imagination. These stories are not simply accounts of women’s lives. They are literature: often humourous, sometimes tragic, and eternally human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Release date: Apr 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781771332804

Gianna Patriarca

Gianna Patriarca was born in Italy and immigrated in 1960 as a child. Her 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 shortlisted for the Bressani Literary Award in 2009. Her work is extensively anthologized in many Canadian, American and Italian publications, and is on university course lists in all three countries. Her work has also been adapted for the stage and for CBC radio drama, and has been part of the documentary Pier 21 with TLN. She lives and works in Toronto.

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