Corrado Paina
ISBN 978-1-894469-37-1
$16.95 CDN / US
72 pp
In a world grown weary of noisy narcissism and the cacophony of the crowd, Corrado Paina’s poetry is an exquisite and welcome reminder of the lost art of reflection.”
– Christopher Hume
“Mid-life, for poets – like anyone else – is a time of existential crisis. The deaths have started to pile up; the poet begins to rehearse his own. For some poets this means elegies and admonitions. But Corrado Paina writes directly to the dead, not about them: in his poems they share space with the living. And his response to his own mortality is not lectures but love poetry: to those same dead, who include friends and parents, and to his very much alive children and wife. And, as always, he writes letters to his city. An eloquent social critic and satirist, he has painted the city visceral red, orange, and purple. Now he adds green, the colour of tenderness. Corrado Paina’s poems are as passionate, funny, angry and bawdy as ever; middle age has hardly pacified him, instead he’s intensified his palette with a note of sweetness.”
– Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
“Corrado Paina’s writing is reflective of the man, complex, intelligent, inquisitive and profoundly human. Souls in plain clothes is Paina’s stunning and aching journey into understanding his position as ‘son’ and ‘father,’ as ‘man’ and ‘artist.’ He lunges into the turbulent currents of life and death with a language that is powerful, disturbing and lyrical. He challenges the reader to enter new spaces, new ideas where thought, emotion and dialogue are free to ‘be.’ Entering Paina’s copious landscapes is a flight that leaves you rich and breathless.”
– Gianna Patriarca
