Morning After You is an articulate and deeply human new poetry collection by novelist and poet Carmelo Militano. Militano writes in a variety of styles: confessional, free verse, lyric, personal monologue, long poem, and prose poem. Each style is dense with sensual and evocative detail regardless of whether he is describing a city landscape, the sky, or the body of a woman. Militano’s poems also celebrate and mediate and seek to capture the complicated dual reality of being and seeing from two cultural perspectives. Militano’s use of direct language, image, and subtle ironic tone combine to create a unique and fresh voice in Canadian letters.

In this appealing collection of readable and evocative poems, Militano examines what it is like to develop a sense of self while trying to balance emotional investments in two different cultures. His experience of downtown Winnipeg and the surrounding countryside is recorded with the same careful attention as the images of his family’s history in rural Calabria. The complex rhythm of his long, easy lines allows the voice to range effectively from the ironic and whimsical, sprinkled with wordplay and literary reference, to the contemplative and the descriptive. In his deceptively straightforward city-scapes, country-scapes, water-scapes and sky-scapes, one finds surprising correspondences between the Prairies and the Mediterranean. In this way, familiar surroundings are re-discovered for us, as though we were seeing them for the first time.
George Amabile, author of Tasting the Dark

Carmelo Militano is a Winnipeg poet and writer. He was born in the village of Cosoleto, province of Reggio di Calabria, Italy and immigrated to Canada at an early age with his parents. He won the 2004 F.G. Bressani award for poetry for his collection Ariadne’s Thread (Olive Press, 2004). He has since published The Minotaur’s Keys (Olive Press, 2006) a chapbook, collected poems Feast Days (Olive Press, 2010) and another chapbook Weather Reports (Olive Press, 2011) which was short-listed in 2012 for the Bressani poetry award. His prose includes the travelogue and family memoir The Fate of Olives (Olive Press, 2006) and the novel Sebastiano’s Vine (Ekstasis Editions, 2013). He reluctantly gave up chicken and hog farming for literature.