Casting Out chronicles the author’s entry as boy, progression through and eventual exit, as an adult, from the Pentecostal world. It’s an attempt to reconcile the evidence-based reasoning of the speaker’s present with the angels and demons of his past. This collection confronts what it means to be loved in a system that the speaker now finds not only irrational but hateful. The poems address the struggle to raise children in the absence of spiritual beliefs and contemplate the questions of whether imparting secular values is enough of a foundation, and how much should a child — even if it is back towards the religious tradition the speaker has left behind — be permitted to find her/his own path.

Rocco de Giacomo is an internationally published poet whose work has appeared most recently in The Malahat Review and Canadian Literature. The author of numerous poetry chapbooks and full-length collections, his latest, Brace Yourselves – on the representation of the individual as it relates to the Zeitgeist – was published in January, 2018, through Quattro Books. His upcoming collection, Casting Out, will be published in 2023 through Guernica Editions. Rocco lives in Toronto with his wife, Lisa Keophila, a fabric artist, and his daughters, Ava and Matilda.

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