Whether misreading sixth?grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino'?s sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information —?? but does so with a wink during detention, a dodgeball to the gut during recess.
'Needs Improvement is as a book of a new logic making its way from witty statements to slow moving alyric villanelles, achieving brilliantly a contemporary sense of streaming among words, places and "no self." Whether this feeling comes from rearranged intentions, satirical knowledge, wise and displaced arguments, each page points a finger at language and does so with "no fears."' — —?? Nicole Brossard
Jon Paul Fiorentino is the author of the novel Stripmalling, which was shortlisted for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and four poetry collections, including The Theory of the Loser Class, which was shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize, and his most recent collection, Indexical Elegies, won the 2010 CBC Book Club "Bookie" Award for Best Book of Poetry. He lives in Montreal, where he teaches writing at Concordia University and edits Matrix magazine.