What are the excuses that bring a man to count the sentence beats that his body pronounces? He could have, he should have won his bread and butter dancing in some cabaret. At least, there, he would have helped the working man and woman to forget their fatigue. But no, there he is digging into the paper fabric with the hope of hearing, like an ethnologist, the echoes of an ancient consciousness. Out of bounds, uomo fuori scopo, this man has produced a lengthy page bearing the title The Irrelevant Man. The bustle comes from paper being scratched. The events here revealed are stories, traits, attacks, blows, screams. What he would not do to lift himself from the tiles in the mansions of poetry.
I've walked into a Western film. / Dressed to the hilt as a cowboy. / There, the desert; here, the city. / No holster, no derringer. / My face unshaven, my hair uncut. / The sun, high noon, too hot to bear. / No cloud in the sun-setting sky. / No truth deep in my pockets.
For more than thirty years, Antonio D’Alfonso has been producing an original and multidimensional oeuvre that includes autobiography, politics, the quotidian, myth, tragedy and humour. Which explains its baroque character ... this mixture of geographies is what creates this poet who stands in the middle of people and things and speaks a singular language comprised of bumps and leaps and a syncopated syntax. The comical pesters the dramatic non-stop as if to bend the human condition under the effort of a lived spirituality. in spite of these trials and tribulations, the poet does not forget that to be human means he is a lyrical clown and a dangerous thinker.
Paul Bélanger, Le Bulletin des Éditions du Noroît
The poeticality of Antonio D’Alfonso’s texts … appears in the figure of the man of honesty who questions without end his place in the City and the commerce he entertains with his fellow citizens … the admission of a persistent passion that turns hearts upside down … a stubborn quest for significance … a philosopher who puts on the mask of the poet in order to better grasp the ambiguities of our world.
Hughes Corriveau, Le Devoir