Ciao, Baby

Olga Costopoulos teaches English at the University of Alberta.

Gianna Patriarca’s third book is a collection of poems about the lives
of immigrant women. Most are autobiographical, or at least have a
first-person speaker. Patriarca must be the last person writing in
Canada to affect the lower-case “I,” which is mostly a visual
irritant. Some of the poems are good, such as “The Other Woman,” a
witty poem about the Blessed Virgin Mary as “the other woman.” The
majority of the poems, however, are almost formulaic, reading more as
very ordinary prose broken into very short lines. The pause required at
the line break fails to add profundity to the words.