D’Alfonso, Antonio. The Italian Canadian Writer.

D'Alfonso begins his answer with four simple definitions, but the reader is soon ensnarled in a historical and encyclopedic narrative that has as many questions as answers.He describes and editorializes on an Italian Canadian literary journey that might very well have started with Liborio Lattoni , the first Italian-language poet in Canada (42).In a refreshing, indiscriminate, and egalitarian fashion, leaning on his thirty years of publishing through Guernica Editions, which he founded in 1978, and relying on his vast knowledge of the Canadian literary community, D'Alfonso quotes and cites a plethora of poets, fiction writers, journalists, essayists, academics, and critics to help him narrate this complex and unique literary movement.The sheer number of quotes and snippets overwhelms but enriches the narrative.He writes about a movement whose "obstinate voice of otherness flies out one city and into another, from one house to another, and [whose] utterance won't be silenced" ( 27).He addresses the birth of this movement that for over fifty years defined the voices of the post-Second World War Italian immigrants and that of the children of those immigrants.The voices of the men and women who chose English Canada and Quebec as their new home, and who wrote about it in Italian, in French, and in English, were "[l]iving abroad" and "welding a new semantic construction of identity" (31).Throughout The Italian Canadian Writer, D'Alfonso touches on a variety of pertinent topics as well as the significant milestones of this time period and the people who participated in accomplishing them: the publishing of Roman Candles