by VINCENT TINGUELY

If there’s a key to poet Jon Paul Fiorentino’s personal style, it’s his directness. “The things I care about, I’m quite insistent about,” he explains. For instance, when he got excited about writer Robert Kroetsch, he didn’t wait to sign up for a workshop or enroll in a class to meet him. “I called him up and bought him a drink,” says Fiorentino. He also convinced Griffin prize-winning poet Christian Bök to read at a recent Matrix literary magazine launch. This characteristic chutzpa at least partially explains his recent ascent into the discerning public’s eye. The appearance of not one, but two poetry collections this year - Transcona Fragments and Resume Drowning - might also have contributed to the buzz.

“It was quite accidental,” Fiorentino insists. “I had a publisher who I was working with at the time, and then I had a publisher get back to me who I wasn’t really expecting to hear from.” The promotional tour for Transcona Fragments led to readings across western Canada, the highlight being the Winnipeg International Writers Festival in September, where he shared the stage with Doug Coupland. “He was a really shy but kind man,” Fiorentino remembers. “We had a drink together and talked about Morrissey a lot. He’s a bit stuck on the Smiths.”

The self-described Winnipeg boy considers Montreal his home now, uniquely conducive to his idiosyncrasies. “I don’t think I can be consistently unhappy anywhere else,” says Fiorentino. “I need to have the consistency of depression to write. I write about place, people and pills, I write about melancholic things. But if melancholy is my subject, I try to do that with a sense of humour.” Readers can get a taste of that special blend in February, when Fiorentino kicks off a reading tour for Resume Drowning with a show in Montreal. Around the same time, Matrix will feature a wide-ranging interview with Robert Kroetsch written by Fiorentino. :