The Essential John Glassco

John Glassco was a Canadian writer known for his reputation as a modern-day dandy as well as for his sophisticated poetry and prose. Born in 1909 to a wealthy family in Montreal, he attended McGill University where he became part of the Montreal Group of modernist writers. He later abandoned his studies to head to Paris, where he encountered many luminaries of the 1920s expatriate community, several of whom populated his popular fictionalized memoir, Memoirs of Montparnasse. Glassco returned to Canada in the 1930s, settling in Foster in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. He went on to publish a wide variety of writings, from critical essays and book reviews to short stories and pornographic novels. His Selected Poems won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1971. Glassco died in 1981.

Carmine Starnino has published five volumes of poetry, including This Way Out (Gaspereau, 2013), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. His most recent collection is Dirty Words (Gaspereau, 2020). Among his awards are the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, the Canadian Author’s Association Prize for Poetry, and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Starnino is the editor of The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Véhicule, 2005), and his critical writings have been collected in A Lover’s Quarrel: Essays and Reviews (Porcupine’s Quill, 2004) and Lazy Bastardism: Reviews and Essays on Canadian Poetry (Gaspereau, 2012). He lives in Montreal, where he is editor at large for The Walrus magazine.