The collected poetry, covering a 50-year span from 1970 to 2020, of one of Canada's most influential writers, literary critics and publishers. His work has been described as a "multidimensional oeuvre that includes autobiography, politics, the quotidian, myth, tragedy and humor." And D'Alfonso himself has been called "a philosopher who puts on the mask of the poet in order to better grasp the ambiguities of our world."
You, divinity that kills, / create mineral animal plant. / How many men begged /
to sleep with you? / How many times your jealous father / drowned you? / You found a refuge / at the bottom of the sea, / where you wait for us to break / your laws and avenge you.
The poeticality of Antonio D’Alfonso’s texts is often found in the social side of emotional thought. It 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. Politically charged poems and his poems of introspection bring to the fore a linguistic dimension where the
mot juste is incarnated as his identity … as a gesture of love for the people close to him, for the people he spends time with, for the writers he reads. It is the admission of a persistent passion that turns hearts upside down, and is a stubborn quest for significance. Perhaps Antonio D’Alfonso is a philosopher who puts on the mask of the poet in order to better grasp the ambiguities of our world.
Hugues Corriveau, Le Devoir
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 humor. 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