The poems in The Sleep of Reason were written in the poet's youth at the beginning of his experiments and poetic explorations. With sheer lyrical madness, poets such as Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess, Thomas Merton, Eugenio Montale and Leonard Cohen haunt the poet's inner life in The Sleep of Reason They are often approximations of earlier works, translations or transliterations of dead poets. At other times, in daring homage or tribute, the poems interrogate each other, or interact and strive to get at their hidden truths. Some of the pieces, in different forms, have appeared in various magazines and collections. The entire work is a kind of "poet's notebook," with the whimsical play of "condemned poems," from which many new poems were derived, worked on, and developed over the years.
Author Biography
Anthony Labriola's work has appeared in The Canadian Form, PRISMinternational, Lo Straniero, Vallum, Stone Voices, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Passion: Poetry, ZiN Daily (Bells & Pomegranates), and Strange Fictions. His tribute to Dylan Thomas, a poem entitled "Missing Dylan," appears in The Colours of Saying: A Celebration. His poetry collections include The Rigged Universe (Shanti Arts Publishing), Sun Dogs (Battered Suitcase Press), Invisible Mending, and The Blessing of the Bikes (Anaphora Literary Press). Among his published prose works are Devouring the Artist, The Pros & Cons of Dragon-Slaying, Poor Love & Other Stories, The Lonely Barber, An Englishman in Italian, and The Dandelion Clock (Anaphora Literary Press), The Japanese Waltzing Mouse & Other Tales (Cranberry Tree Press). A new poetry collection, Birds & Arrows, published by Shanti Arts, will appear in 2017. He lives in Toronto with his family.