Abstract

Many of the poems in this collection deal with issues of immigration, exile and cultural loss. The emphasis, however, is not placed on ethnicity in any strict sense, but rather on taking the, by now, familiar premise of the immigrant subject and giving it back to the reader, as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney writes, "with a clean new music in it". The Italian-Canadian identity of the poems--or its Italianita --is enacted either through autobiographical narrative or by mediating on certain relevant cultural and societal artifacts. The collection ends with a long poem devoted to reclaiming and celebrating old, forgotten English words.