• Shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

transcona fragments is Jon Paul Fiorentino's second collection of poems. The book's point of departure is the suburban community of Transcona, a railway town that has been stitched to the city of Winnipeg.

The poems move from vivid imagistic fragments that capture the essence of Transcona, to explorations of familial history, to sensitive, self-referential engagement of the "lyric I" – a voice made up of melancholy, anxiety and psychotropic experience. These are poems that offer the reader unique notions of home, memory, and self.

transcona fragments

ah, good old ground tasting like invasive snow
salt reeling under exhaust (no matter the cost)
and don't forget to write from the east where
you will sit in a state of abandoned bliss stitched
to a street that hardly knows you

unpacking that metaphor the unkempt gravel
or tar of a transcona side street driving with your
third eye on the road splaying yourself out the side
window, with both eyes on what you know

that taste, that region: gravel, tar, spit leaves
of glass splinters on the dream road tin am radio
chevrolet and a block heater and an electric blanket
and a six pack for christmas

park on the frigid plain, dig a ditch round the city
plunge into floodway and dream headlong into traffic
as if you had the guts as if you ever had
the pleasure

under windows laced with the thickest frost
you ramble on about the weather and the family
and i'm almost lured into your language until i recoil
at the irrational flash of a police search light

we quickly clothe ourselves and turn down the heater
and turn up the radio and pretend to be innocents with
decorative smiles for the constable who was hoping
for something more cinematic