Len Gasparini

In his latest book of stories Len Gasparini holds a broken mirror up to reality to reveal the shattered shards of vivid characters with grace and precision. The stories in When Does A Kiss Become a Bite? are Chekhovian in scope, eloquent statements, strikingly rendered, executed with dark tenderness and hypnotic conviction. Gasparini writes with a rough, seductive charm of the private loneliness of Tennessee Williams, of a couple of rounders on a wild ride to New Orleans, of a nightworker consumed by Gothic fear and self-loathing, of a Poe scholar, finding his Annabel Lee, but, like Poe, ending in the gutter. An authentic narrative impulse drives each of the ten stories, as if Nelson Algren and O. Henry, after a night of serious drinking, collaborated until they wrote as one.

Len Gasparini is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Broken World: Poems 1967-1998 and a collection for children, I Once Had a Pet Praying Mantis. He is the author of two previous story collections, Blind Spot and A Demon in My View (Guernica 2003), and a work of nonfiction, Erase Me, with photographs by Leslie Thomson. In 1990, he was awarded the F. G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. He lives in Toronto.