Flesh - a composite of poems perceived, evoked, discovered, moving between and among sensory boundaries as they eschew forward, backward or around exterior life to interior. Here Flesh of person, nature, language, spaces meet separate and become one. Flesh as surfaces, layers, textures, beings with sense memory perceptions of an unforgiving Flesh that scars and the forgiving Flesh that rebuilds itself.

Sonia Di Placido is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Writer’s Union of Canada, Canadian Women in The Literary Arts and The Association of Italian-Canadian Writers. An Associate Editor of Juniper Poetry Magazine, she has had poems published by Carousel, Puritan, The White Wall Review, Jacket2, Canthius, The California Journal of Women Writers, and Juniper Poetry Magazine. In September 2016, she was part of the China Writers Association International Writer’s Residency for the cities of Tianjin, Binhai and Beijing. Sonia teaches English for Academic Purposes at George Brown College. Her first book Exaltation in Cadmium Red was published with Guernica Editions in 2012. Flesh is her second full-length book of poetry. Sonia's current writing updates can be found on her website/blog: diplacido.wordpress.com

Sonia Placido's profile page

Di Placido favours an elliptical yet sensuous lyric foregrounded by irreverent etymological play

Quill & Quire

Flesh is a book of shimmering skins. Its poems explore the material afterlife of our surfaces, reveal how we and the world we encounter, “carving [ … ] sight and sense,” are surface all the way down. Flesh itself is a body luminous, writhing, gristled, brilliant and singing. In her moonlit poetry of spines, pelts, and pulp, Di Placido’s work is an offering: “I give you words in all of my skins—”

Julie Joosten, Author of Light Light

Flesh is an out-of-body/in-body, shapeshifting experience that both delights and astonishes. These trailblazing poems are unpredictable, bold, unsettling and edged with wonder. Sonia Di Placido has penned a brilliant opus. A sizzling and tender foray into disillusionment, madness, “the cult of culture” and the unquenchable thirst to belong. In Flesh, Di Placido has created a “hands on world,” an enchantment of poems, not to be missed.

Lisa Young, Publisher of Juniper Poetry

Sonia Di Placido’s attunement to language’s surfaces and dark interiors animates landscapes of Protestant Ontario through Mediterranean sensuality and warmth. Her attention shines in starkly compressed words, the (dis)ordered values of sympathetic, creative judgement. Di Placido’s plumb line reaches for impossible depths, a sign of extraordinary resilience, artistic dream, and curiosity for the contradictory realities apposing our world now.

Dale M. Smith, Author of Slow Poetry in America