From card games around the kitchen table and crap games in the alley, to race tracks and casinos, Dolor Midnight is a book that is of necessity eclectic in style and form, covering a wide variety of gambling experiences. One recurring voice anchors the text, that of the author, but it is a voice circled by the voice of other addicted gamblers who relate their own compulsions and how those fevers were slowly extinguished into a lifelong numbness of loss and debt. Few entire books of poetry have been written about gambling, and Dolor Midnight offers an in depth perspective on the subject, affirms the notion that the gambler's goal is not to win but to lose, that every wager feeds a death wish, that the gambler's need to conquer and master chance is motivated by the same drive that seeks to end life and all its uncertain and random occurrences.

A member of the Toronto literary scene since the late 1990's, Luciano Iacobelli is a Toronto poet, visual artist, editor, and cultural events organizer. He is the author of six full length collections of poetry: The Angel Notebook (2007), The Book of Disorders (2011), Painting Circles (2011), The Emu Dialogues (with Jens Kohler and Robert Marra, 2015), The Examined Life (2016), Dolor Midnight (2018). Noctograms is his seventh collection, and the work where his preoccupation with merging the literary with the visual is most fully realized.

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