Ligatures [Paperback]

Some four centuries after warlike and fur-trading Europeans first contacted the warlike and grease-trading tribes of the area, the enormous Canadian province of British Columbia remains, in the literary sense, strikingly underwritten. BC, and particularly its vast muddy port Vancouver, have survived the province’s lack of key fiction and poems for a long time, and it’s a happy and prosperous, perhaps even post-literary, zone today: a booming brokerage space between Ontarian, Californian, and Asian media empires. You can scarcely find a Lower Mainland pencil-pusher these days who doesn’t aim to write for the movies, for example. And one local weekly’s recent headline about architecture in “The World’s Youngest City” showed, simultaneously, a very Canadian ignorance of actual history and facts, and a very American/New Chinese longing to rush headlong into a lucrative future. In short, Vancouverite and British Columbian culture has never been ideal ground for the growth of great literature in any recognizable mould. But the province’s restless energy has often generated good, and sometime even remarkable writing (bits of Emily Carr; George Bowering; Douglas Coupland; Timothy Taylor and Don Coles, arguably). At the very least, the writer reviewed here suggests that Vancouver’s status as an amnesiac bartertown of history and geography will continue to give us a trickle of pretty superior readables.
The strangest of the recent small-press crop is the critic and sometime visual artist Donato Mancini. His first book of poems and poem-like things, Ligatures, has a friendly-looking tricycle silhouetted on its cover, portending, you’d hope, the kind of avant-gardeism that doesn’t depend for its effects on a degenerate erudition, but rather on an absolutely fresh, even child-like, approach to important questions. It’s a pleasure to report that Mancini mostly lives up to his trike, coming off usually like a bright Martian inquiring into this thing humans call language, and only occasionally like a grouchy Marxist who has read 20,000 books and got tenure the year Foucault died.
Mancini’s nutty attack, for example, on the “at-sign”-you know, that circled lower-case “a” in the middle of your email address-is hard to resist, especially when he crayons a small “z” with a round perimeter on it, and insists that this must mean “zoo”. Well, why not? Mancini is a prankster whose typographical insanities and mathematical insults to English aren’t just for laughs (he thinks, harder than most lyric poets do, about the relationship of code and abbreviation to humankind’s unsymbolic inner nature), but they also aren’t for everyone. Ligatures is one of the finer texts to emerge from a decade of intellectually-distinguished and instantly-remaindered experimental Vancouver ferment involving Simon Fraser University’s sort-of-English Department, the Western Front artists’ collective and the Kootenay School of Writing (the latter entity being the kind to put quote marks round both “school” and “writing”; and to persist in being located nowhere near the Kootenay region). This is not to cut down Mancini’s witty and mirthful accomplishment in Ligatures, but to say that it’s a rarefied piece of work, a cunning and esoteric thing, built for connoisseurs.
Lyle Neff (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

Donato Mancini’s debut collection remixes key concepts behind the most radical writing experiments of the twentieth century: the use of linguistic restrictions to generate text; the incorporation of found elements; typographical exploration of the visual properties of letters. Conventions of typography and comic book panels combine with Mancini’s takes on the currently ubiquitous @ symbol to create a lighthearted and learned look at the relationship between art and poetics.

Toronto–born, Hamilton–raised, Vancouver–resident writer, visual artist, and polymath Donato Mancini's individual and/or collaborative works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Cuba, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. He has written extensively about music, and has contributed more than 600 articles to www.allmusic.com. His poetry has been published in Matrix, brokenpencil, Vallum, Grain, W, Rampike, Queen Street Quarterly, subTerrain, above/ground, and the Antigonish Review. Mancini has published eight chapbooks; Ligatures is his first full–length book.