Émile Nelligan was born in Montreal on Christmas eve, 1879. His first poem , Rêve fantastique was published in 1896 and for the next three years his poems appeared in local papers and journals. Following a series of public readings in 1899 he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He was confined to the Saint-Benoît Asylum where he remained for the next 25 years and then was transferred to the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital. Remarkably, all of Nelligans 107 poems were written when he was between the ages of 16 and 19. A pioneer of French-Canadian literature, Émile Nelligan died in 1941

.Marc di Saverio's is the author of a previous collection of poems, Sanitorium Songs (2010). His poems and translations have appeared in CNQ, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, and Partisan. In 2016, he was awarded the City of Hamilton Arts Award For Best Emerging Writer. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.