Con Brio

Con Brio: The Life and Works of Len Gasparini is designed to be as lively, as creative, as forceful yet as subtle as the writer whose poems, stories, and essays it celebrates. Framing this volume are 26 enjoyable remembrances of Len Gasparini, then 26 insightful commentaries by the same contributors on their personal favourites amongst his poems. Featured, too, are new poems by George Elliott Clarke, Carlinda D'Alimonte, and Marianne Micros paired with the counterparts by Gasparini that inspired them. Major essays by George Elliott Clarke, Joseph Pivato, J.R. (Tim) Struthers, and others explore the enduring artistry of Gasparini's works.

J.R. (TIM) STRUTHERS has edited some thirty volumes of theory, criticism, autobiography, short stories, and poetry. Among these titles are his two collections for Guernica Editions on Clark Blaise, then his three collections for Guernica Editions on Alice Munro, and now this book in honour of Len Gasparini. Tim has been publishing on Canadian literature for some fifty years, beginning, in 1975, with the first two scholarly articles worldwide on Alice Munro and including, in 2024, the critically and formally innovative co-authored study Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices. Like writers James Reaney and Alice Munro and Len Gasparini, Tim was born and raised in Southwestern Ontario, where he still happily resides, now writing and editing and publishing full-time following a fifty-year career of university teaching.