An English-Italian bilingual collection of love poems, Text Me expresses through language and metaphor the many ways to say “I love you.” Calabrò’s poems often evolve from the experiences of the body: from sensual impressions, “Your cheek on my weary shoulder / the day pales, your lips pale / up, up, one more wing-beat / till we run out of oxygen”;  to image, “In cold blood / the ice contrail of a Phantom jet /stabs the blue. / Like a blade in honey / you plunge your gaze into my heart”; to memory , “We met and I kissed you / already consumed by the need to betray you.” Although rooted in Calabrò's Mediterranean, these poems have a universality which give voice to our common burden of love, sorrow and guilt.

Corrado Calabrò, born in Reggio Calabria, completed his first book when he was twenty and has since published seventeen more collections. HIs poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages and they have been collected in a theatre recital that toured extensively throughout Italy, Europe, Australia, and South America. His novel, Ricorda di dimenticarla, a finalist for the Strega Prize, was the basis for the 2006 movie Il mercante di pietre, (The Stone Merchant). In 2011 Calabrò was awarded The Cetonaverde Prize for career achievement.

Corrado Calabro's profile page

Genni Gunn is an author, musician and translator. Born in Trieste, she came to Canada as a child. She has published fourteen books: four novels -- The Cipher, Solitaria (longlisted for the Giller Prize), Tracing Iris (made into a film, The Riverbank), and Thrice Upon a Time (finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize); three short story collections -- Permanent Tourists (finalist for the ReLit Prize), Hungers, and On the Road; three poetry collections -- Accidents (finalist for the Di Cicco Poetry Prize), Faceless, and Mating in Captivity (finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award); and a collection of personal essays, TRACKS: Journeys in Time and Place (finalist for the CNFC Reader's Choice Award). As well, she has translated from Italian three collections of poems by two renowned Italian authors: Text Me by Corrado Calabro, and Traveling in the Gait of a Fox (finalist for the Premio Internazionale Diego Valeri for Literary Translation) and Devour Me Too (finalist for the John Glassco Translation Prize) by Dacia Maraini. Three of Gunn's books have been translated into Italian and Dutch.

As well as books, she has written an opera libretto, Alternate Visions, produced by Chants Libres in 2007 (music by John Oliver), and projected in a simulcast at The Western Front in Vancouver; her poem, "Hot Summer Nights" has been turned into classical vocal music by John Oliver, and performed internationally. Before she turned to writing full-time, Gunn toured Canada extensively with a variety of bands (bass guitar, piano and vocals). Since then, she has performed at hundreds of readings and writers' festivals. Gunn has a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver.

Genni Gunn's profile page

In the velvet of night, vision rescues the poet and opens psychic scenarios in which the re-established contact with the forces of nature enables him to penetrate the mystery of life and the universe; penetrate but not decipher. The women he sometimes names in his poems (Jessica, Michelle, etc.), are nothing but masks of love, the true one, who doggedly pursues Calabró, who has the ability to surprise him and who flows inexhaustible in his arteries. — Fabia Baldi