April 2014

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by Loreta Giannetti

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5.5 x 8.5 inches |80 pp | 978-1-926655-73-4 | $17.00

In the Bone Cracks of the Walls

by Tina Biello

Light lingers. Waits.
In the bone cracks of the walls
stories whisper …

Tina Biello reimagines the tales, the rituals, and the generations of Casacalenda, her ancestral village in Italy. She retrieves village stories in language that drifts between English and the Casacalenda dialect her immigrant parents spoke around the kitchen table in a small town in Canada. These poems, immigrant voices, resonate by being inhabited by two places: the place right here and the one born into you.

"I know the 'here' in Tina Biello's poetry. Her steps past 'the stones, the doors, the trees, the farms' is this beautiful music. We, as readers, must admire what she has done. I believe her reason for writing is for these lyrical chances to breathe the names again—the names of the people who are part of Cascalenda, a magical place in her storytelling."
—Russell Thorburn

Tina Biello grew up in Lake Cowichan, a small logging town in British Columbia. She studied Theatre at UBC and now teaches Commedia dell'Arte and performance mask work at various institutions and schools. She has written and toured The Indigo Kids, a children's play about autism. Her poems have appeared since 2008 in chapbook anthologies edited by Patrick Lane. Her chapbook Momenti, published by Leaf Press, was shortlisted for the Bressani Prize in Vancouver, and was part of a multi-disciplinary art exhibition of poetry and watercolour in Montreal and Vancouver. Those poems were also set to music composed and performed by Marguerite Thorne and Annette Coffin, which resulted in a CD called Dolci Momenti.

Tina Biello's web address is here.