19 October 2006
Carmine Starnino Wins Bressani Prize

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that Carmine Starnino’s With English Subtitles (2004) has been named this year’s winner of the Italian Cultural Centre’s biennial F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. The winning titles in the other three categories are Mena Martini’s Cristallo for best novel, Dave Bidini’s Baseballissimo for creative non-fiction and Fabrizio Napoleone’s Leftovers for short fiction. The award is named after the Jesuit father Francesco Giuseppe Bressani (1612–1672), and was established in 1986 to encourage and honour literary works by Italian Canadian authors, as well as those from other backgrounds. Past winners include Nino Ricci, John Terpstra and Michael Ondaatje. This year’s awards will be presented in a ceremony to be held on Friday, October 27, at the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver, BC.

With English Subtitles is Carmine Starnino’s third collection, and his most inventive. The poems are exceptionally focused, musical and inviting. Household objects, Italian relatives, Yukon landscapes, worst-case scenarios and relationships are pushed onto the page with new-found urgency and delight. Coupled with this energy is a focus on the process of decay and the beauty contained therein. Junkyard, charity auction, failed relationship and autumn all center on the varied and tenuous aesthetic of rust.

Carmine Starnino is a poet, essayist, critic, editor of Signal Editions (an imprint of Véhicule Press), and associate editor at Maisonneuve magazine. His first poetry collection, The New World, was nominated for the 1997 QSPELL A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His second collection, Credo, won the 2001 Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. With English Subtitles also won the 2004 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Carmine Starnino lives in Montreal.

Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Alberta Book Award for fiction and the Alcuin Award for excellence in book design.

For more information contact
Beth Crosby at Gaspereau Press
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002, info@gaspereau.com