First Comes Love

by Pino Coluccio

In First Comes Love, Pino Coluccio takes family matters, high school angst, dead end jobs, and enduring love and turns them into poetry as catchy as a pop song. These are the kind of poems that recognize our human foibles and comment on them with humour and pathos. First Comes Love is a book that can win over readers who have forgotten that poetry can be funny as well as true.

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2005

About the author

Pino Coluccio's poems have appeared in The Walrus and three anthologies. His first collection, First Comes Love, came out in 2005 to generally favourable reviews. In addition to writing, and his day job (about which the less said the better), he runs a multi-hundred dollar tutoring empire and co-edits The Rotary Dial.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

There comes a time when sitting home alone
looking at your life - "I'm such a knob" -
gets to be a drag. You hate your job,
your car's a piece of crap, and what you eat
is fatty, fried and salty. But then you meet
a girl; the life you've made a mess of pulses.
And not content to mess up just your own,
you settle down and mess up someone else's.

- First Comes Love, pg. 15

* * *

Uncles and mothers
say always treat others
how you would like them to treat you.

"But masochists can't,"
I said to my aunt.
She gave me a bruise and it's blue.

- Childhood, pg. 17

* * *

For ten years, hornier than lonely;
then adulthood. Youth is a long convalescence,
adulthood a rueful looking back to what was only
a badly botched attempt at adolescence.

- Adulthood, pg. 18

* * *

A tighter grip on slick contours
scented to entice
will make it slip away.
Keep it cupped loose -

the slim chip you'll glide it to
will shatter when it drops.
A final frail sud,
it softly pops.

- Soap, pg. 64