The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. His books and chapbooks include Snowline (2015), Loitersack (2014), Buffet World (2011), Fact ‘N’ Value (2011), Hell Passport no.22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006), and Ligatures (2005). Ligatures and Æthel were each nominated for the ReLit Poetry Award, and Ligatures received honourable mention in the Alcuin Society book design awards. Mancini’s published critical writing includes work on the archive, time, and memory in Anamnesia: Unforgetting (2011), and a discourse analysis of poetry reviews in You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012). He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia.
Judges’ Citation
Donato Mancini’s Same Diff crosses pre-existing texts with a strong design impulse to assemble a work of unusual beauty, resonance, and timelessness.
Donato Mancini’s Same Diff crosses pre-existing texts with a strong design impulse to assemble a work of unusual beauty, resonance, and timelessness. In “Snowline,” a famous French phrase about snow is translated over centuries; translations snow down the pages until the original phrase is buried; they fall through different hands until they turn from snow into a meditation on time. Mancini’s primary methods are curatorial (he assembles), orchestral (he co-ordinates), mechanical (he repeats), and archaeological (he excavates language rather than the world for his materials). He fractures words to let out their yolk. Same Diff is a monument to Mancini’s accomplishments: he uses the words of others without appropriation; he negotiates self-effacement, humility, and invisibility; he offers a way to recover a self, not through self-assertion, but by attending to the voices and needs of others. What belongs to any of us? Even Mancini’s words never seem to be his. He is a custodian of language who returns it to us cleaned.
Selected poems
by Donato Mancini
“Forty days of snow are registered in the Paris archives of 1435, the trees died and the birds …
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? (1461 François Villon)
But where is the last yeares snow? (1653)
Tell me, if ye know; What is come of last year’s snow? (1835)
Where is fled the south wind’s snow? (1835)
But where are the snows of yester-year? (1869)
But where is the last year’s snow? (1877)
But what is become of last year’s snow? (1899)
But – where are the last year’s snows? (1900)
But where indeed is last year’s snow? (1900)
Where are the snows of yesteryear? (1900)
Copyright © 2017 by Donato Mancini
from Snowline
in my eyes
in my face
in my voice
in my neck
in my throat
in my shoulders
in my heart
in my lungs
in my whole bloody body
in my social organs in general
in everywhere, flushing, sweating, pounding heart
in my collarbone and neck area
in my hands, tingling and prickling sensations
in my left shoulder blade, aches and pounds
in my stomach, and my back is paining too
in my arms, my arms feel big and heavy
Copyright © 2017 by Donato Mancini
from Where do you feel?
before i start i want to say you shouldn’t blame yourself
there’s no point in beating around the bush
there’s something we need to talk about
this is the most difficult thing i’ve ever had to tell anyone
the longer i wait the harder it’s going to be
it’s best if we face this right now
what i’m about to tell you won’t be easy to hear
i know this will hurt but it has to be said
i don’t like being the bearer of bad news
please sit down, this could come as a shock
you knew this was coming, right?
i hope this won’t be a complete surprise
hate to break it to you
please don’t kill the messenger
i have some really bad news
how do i even say this
this is really really hard for me
there are no words for what i have to tell you
i can’t go on lying anymore
you aren’t going to like what i have to say
Copyright © 2017 by Donato Mancini