All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been [Paperback]

All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been, Joe Fiorito’s second collection, establishes him as the preeminent chronicler of people in extremis. Drawing on the precison and unsentimentality that have become hallmarks of his poetry, Fiorito creates uncompromising mini-narratives about addiction, failed rehabs, incarceration, demeaning jobs, and homelessness; much of it derived from nearly two decades spent as a newspaper columnist covering daily life on Toronto’s streets. In poem after poem, Fiorito’s exact word choices, cold-eyed details, and crisp internal rhymes mete out moments both beautiful and harrowing: “her little finger curls a bit/she cut a tendon when she slit/ her wrist; she’d clenched/ her fist.”

“How does Joe Fiorito do it? The mixture of toughness, elegance and lethal wit. The street-smart, bruising tenderness packed into language sharper than flint.” –Mark Abley “Fiorito’s poems are … wonderfully inventive and skillful in poetic form, while remaining casual, colloquial: the art of the street’s voice.”–A.F Moritz

The author of eight books,Joe Fioritowon the National Newspaper Award for Columns in 1995; the Brassani Prize for Short Fiction in 2000; and the City of Toronto Book Award in 2003.City Poems, his first book of poetry, was published in 2018. He lives in Toronto with his wife.