This Way Out

This Way Out
Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino trains his eye on the here and now in this collection of poems, and finds in the sights, sounds and smells of a vacation in Rome as well as his home and native Montreal visions of the strangest things. The quotidian cracks open and is transformed – a butcher at his hack work develops into a portrait of the artist, and a woman four months pregnant gives birth to a memory of old men slumped on park benches, their rhyming shapes closing life’s parentheses. The few poems that don’t work tilt with rhetorical overload, but for the most part great conclusions are kept at bay and the poems “stick with small answers” rendered in finely measured lines that make careful use of sound effects and intervals of freighted silence.