Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems

by Alessandro Porco

Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems is the daring new collection of poetry from Alessandro Porco. Equally crude and charming, locker-room macho and sensitive, these poems are always singularly marked by formal ingenuity and stylistic élan. A poetry that gleefully articulates the possibilities of a 21st century balls-deep masculinity, Porco’s new collections begins with its most important work, “Augustine in Carthage,” a trans-historical re-imagining of Book III of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which includes (among other things) philosophizing strippers, Tampico bombers, rabbit holes, coprology, and comic-book heroism. But for all its bombast “Augustine in Carthage” examines, quite seriously, ideas related to the experience of experience, the morality of poetry, and the hypocrisy of spiritual conversion. The book ends with an equally significant suite of depraved yet learned limericks: Porco’s perverse star shines in this unprecedented contribution to Canadian letters, exploring myriad filthy matters of heart. Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems also includes translations of Italian poetry, re-mixes of classic English poems, performance pieces, tender love poems, and — if you would believe — even a short pornographic novel. Reminding readers that through Tradition the strange and new emerges, this is a deeply-felt and original collection, a work that understands (as its epigraph, in the words of Diderot, insists) “there is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.”

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Alessandro Porco is a poet, critic, and scholar. Currently, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he is working toward a dissertation on the subject of hip-hop poetics. The author of The Jill Kelly Poems and the forthcoming Augustine in Carthage, he is originally from Brampton, Ontario. His poetry has appeared in such literary magazines as Matrix, Grain, and Queen Street Quarterly.

Reviews

[Kane Faucher · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his Confessions, VIII.vii, Augustine proclaims, “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo” (“grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”). Much prior to his becoming an influential neoplatonic bishop and Church Father, it would be an understatement to characterize his life as being immodest. Under the auspices of studying rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine gave full range to his appetite for hedonism and debauchery, taking on a concubine and living what passed for a seedy existence in the 4th century.
Porco’s svelte offering is a bawdy, modern-day raconteur of such excesses, fêting sex, jazz, ontology, and drugs with poetry that actively courts prose. With a delectable and saucy style, Porco does not fail to astonish by performing a tense merger between items of high scholarly reference and pop culture. Latin phrases and invocations of Kant, Gogol, Pasolini, Eliot, et al are tastefully appended as they shoulder for dominance among an Arcanum of ribald subjects such as whores, dildos and pole dancers. What makes this collection of poems wonderfully vertiginous reading is the obvious breadth of the poet’s knowledge and deftness in crafting these to suit contemporary subjects of delightfully dubious moral standing. Porco takes us on a dark journey into strip clubs, across the fields of dirty limericks, and all the while acting as a harlequin Virgil. To gain a fair appreciation of Porco’s style, one would have to picture a frenzied hybrid of Burroughs and Bukowski as filtered through Umberto Eco. With the sharp wit of Voltaire and the echoes of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Porco’s work is highly deserving of all the acclaim it receives.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 2 out of 5]

Porco is erudite-- I get it-- and mired in the saucy spectacle of contemporary sexuality-- ok-- but I wasn't feeling it. He's a little too delighted with this juxtaposition and awfully happy with himself for stumbling on it. I don't know. The doggerel is sure doggeresque.