This Way Home

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

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

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