The Weight of Survival
Caitlin Press, poetry, 2024
In The Weight of Survival, Tina Biello retraces her family’s journey from post-war Italy to a small logging town near Cowichan Lake, exploring themes of identity, queerness and belonging.
“Chronicling her family’s journey from their ancestral home in sun-drenched Casacalenda to the cloud-covered region of Cowichan complete with curses as companions and proverbs as memory portals, The Weight of Survival serves as another cherished collection of poems by Tina Biello. Lush with vivid language and crafted with care in capturing the cadence of Molise’s disappearing dialect, Biello’s writing brims with love, honours grief, and thrums with an enduring heartbeat shaped by the diasporic existence.”
—Eufemia Fantetti
Playing into Silence
Caitlin Press, poetry, 2018
Poet Tina Biello unearths just about everything from beneath the Alberta ground: dinosaur bones, a family’s firstborn, missing cows. A voice from within the Prairies, Playing Into Silence is a look back at a dry time in lesbian identity.
“Biello’s language is rich with emblems: old furniture, old vehicles and machines, a mask, a musical instrument. Arguably, Biello’s narrative format allows merging of subjective/ objective material more easily in poetry than prose.”
—BC BookWorld
A Housecoat Remains
Guernica Editions, poetry, 2015
This collection tells a multi-layered story between worlds: old country vs. new, traditional life vs. modern, health vs. illness. Biello takes us on a journey between these worlds and shows us how mother, father and daughter cope with loss and re-discover each other through the difficult illness of Alzheimer's disease.
In her deft homage to her post-WWII Italian parents, Biello takes us into their three shifting worlds: the old country; the new; the new-ways of their Canadian-born children. We eat sugo at their table, grab a rock to stop a repeated taunt, hold their dying hand and are invigorated by their tenacity, vitality. When you finish this book, it stays put in your heart.
—Betsy Warland author of
Breathing the Page – Reading the Act of Writing
In the Bone Cracks of the Walls
Leaf Press, poetry, 2014
Tina Biello reimagines the tales, the rituals, and the generations of Casacalenda, her ancestral village in Italy. These poems, immigrant voices, resonate by being inhabited by two places: the place right here and the one born into you.
Light lingers. Waits.
In the bone cracks of the walls
stories whisper…
Momenti
Leaf Press, poetry, 2012
Momenti is a collection of poems inspired by Tina Biello’s cousin Loreta Giannetti's watercolours of their ancestral village—Casacalenda—on the southeast coast of Italy. Their collaborative exhibition, Acquerelli e poesie di Kalena, was showcased at the Vancouver Italian Cultural Centre March 27 to April 9, 2010.
The poems are rich with the dialect from Casacalenda. Using an iPod Shuffle, museum-goers were able to hear the poems in Molise dialect and in English. The closing gala featured live music with original compositions to Tina's poetry. The compositions have now become a CD of 8 songs called Dolci Momenti, by Annette Coffin and Marguerite Thorne.