This collection of poems tells a multi-layered story between worlds: old country vs. new, traditional life vs. modern, health vs. illness. Biello takes us on a journey between these worlds and shows us how mother, father and daughter cope with loss and re-discover each other through the difficult illness of Alzheimer's disease. Everything must change to make way for this new journey. This is the beat of her language, culture and family disappearing, but somehow, at the heart of it all, love remains.

Tina Biello is Italian by way of Lake Cowichan, BC. She is born to immigrant parents from Southern Italy. She lives on the traditional territory of the Snaw-naw-as people. She is an actor, a poet and playwright. She had the great privilege of working with mentor Patrick Lane from 2008-2019. Her first full-length book of poetry, In the Bone Cracks of the Walls, published by Leaf Press, was part of a multi-disciplinary art exhibition of poetry, watercolour and music in Montreal, Vancouver and Italy. A Housecoat Remains is her second collection with Guernica Editions, 2015. Playing into Silence is her third collection with Caitlin Press, 2018. Her recent two-act play is based on Lorna Crozier’s poems from A Saving Grace. She was the second Poet Laureate of Nanaimo from 2017–2020. Since then she has been collaborating with composers and the Vancouver Island Symphony with new symphonic works set to her poetry.

Tina Biello's profile page

It’s remarkable how much can be revealed, the grief and the loss, in the spare lines of Biello’s poems.

Vancouver Sun

Tina Biello’s stark, spare lines capture the mysterious expanse of loss – first of a mother to Alzheimer’s, then a father. With a keen ear for the range of emotions in the human voice and for the music of language, she records this territory in a sensual and moving way, celebrating as much as she mourns our deepest connections to each other, and the ultimate requirement of love, which is to let go. A wonderful debut.

Pamela Porter, author of the Governor General’s Award-winning The Crazy Man

In her deft homage to her post-WWII Italian parents, Biello takes us into their three shifting worlds: the old country; the new; the new-ways of their Canadian-born children. We eat sugo at their table, grab a rock to stop a repeated taunt, hold their dying hand and are invigorated by their tenacity, vitality. When you finish this book, it stays put in your heart.

Betsy Warland, author of Breathing the Page – Reading the Act of Writing