This book contains selections from Gianna Patriarca’s previously published poetry books, as well as a number of new poems. It is a collection written by a woman in a time when the support and the encouragement was as limited as visibility. In many ways it is a collection of verses written as an act of survival and acknowledgement of existence.

Gianna is an award-winning author of 8 books of poetry, a children’s book and a collection of short fiction. Her work is extensively anthologized, adapted for Canada Stage and CBC radio drama. Her books appear on the course list of universities in Canada, USA and Italy and is featured in numerous documentaries. Italian Women and Other Tragedies is in its 4th printing and has been translated into Italian. Her other works include All My Fallen Angelas(Ianna Publications, 2016), To the Men Who Write Goodbye Letters (Ianna, 2020) and This Way Home (Guernica, 2021). Forthcoming are her children's story (Second Story Press, 2022) and her novel The Sicilian's Bride.

Gianna Patriarca's profile page

Gianna Patriarca’s selected and new work attests to the rare capability of some poetry to lead you to the right place, where you are supposed to go. Vulnerable yet powerful. Intimate and familiar.

Anna Mongibello

Gianna Patriarca's work has the power to speak clearly and loudly to all generations. Her poems are a friendly exhortation to taste the bitter and the sweet. I find true genius in how skillfully Patriarca articulates and renders universally intelligible the thoughts and feelings of particular fragments of her experience. I quite simply love her work.

Paolo Frasca

Gianna Patriarca has contributed decades of intense and inspiring poetry to the Canadian literary landscape. She writes about the passion of immigrant communities, anger, love, the rough broken skin of workers' hands, fierce young women who defy their fathers' belts and ultimately the practicality of survival. Patriarca offers us hauntingly powerful poems with a spirited humour and a full heart.

Karleen Pendleton Jimenez

Gianna Patriarca has written deeply human poetry about the world and people around her. Her work is warm, compassionate, bitter, gentle — like that of the southern Italian socialist poet, Rocco Scotellaro, whom we both admire — full of insights, hard truths and love of family and friends. With this wonderful collection Patriarca should now take up her deserved place as a major Canadian poet.

Rob Rolfe

Patriarca's verses transcend the particular and reveal a universal story of linguistic displacement, physical displacement, social struggles, and alienation with the joys of living "life as theatre" in a community with one's food, belief, and heritage culture. Her poems speak to all immigrants who want their faces to be recognized. This Way Home is essential for understanding la storia di Canada.

Teresa Ruso