Aethel
Fascinated by the ligature –– a joining of two letters in a single word –– Donato Mancini chose, logically, to conjure one up in the title of his second book of concrete poetry, Æthel. "Although," as Mancini remarks parenthetically, "it might be the name of the crabby old blue–rinse who calls the police if you cross her lawn."
Æthel, the …
Buffet World
Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late–late–night–snack capitalism.
Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors o …
Ligatures
Donato Mancini's debut collection remixes key concepts behind the most radical writing experiments of the twentieth century: the use of linguistic restrictions to generate text; the incorporation of found elements; typographical exploration of the visual properties of letters. Conventions of typography and comic book panels combine with Mancini's t …
You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence
While Canadian poetic practices have steadily pluralised since the early 1960s, the poetry review has remained stubbornly constant. You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence is a critical, and at times hilarious survey of reviews of innovative Canadian poetry in English since 1961. What is at stake in the reviewing of poetry? What fantasie …
