Resume Drowning

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Jon Paul Fiorentino is the editor of Matrix magazine. Although he
currently lives in Montreal, his Manitoba roots are often apparent in
his poetry.

The poems in Resume Drowning evoke an intriguing mixture of modern pop
culture and the hallowed halls of university libraries. Fiorentino’s
use of repetition, unusual spacing, and blank parentheses forces the
reader to become part of the thoughts he is expressing. The bluntness of
his approach is softened by his ability to deliver freshness and
refinement in such lines as, “call us up / and have our heads lopped
off / in a perverse synchronicity / against the backdrop / of a starry
cosmogonic sky.”

Although the poet expresses a sense of disdain and/or a controlled
anger directed at life in general, there is nothing maudlin or
despairing in this collection.