Once in a Lifetime

This is a joint publication of Floricanto and Berkeley Presses. Fifty poems and one day provide the footage for Chris Campanioni's Once in a Lifetime (a film in four acts). But even time gradually dissolves in this coming-of-age drama interlaced with pop music, the age of Internet and status updates, cinema and celebrity, memories of Cuba and Poland, and the passage to the United States. Runtime: 24 hours. "Chris Campanioni takes you down the alleys and arteries and sugary retail aisles of your lifetime. He has captured a moment between our machine world and our humanity, telescoping the grandeur of existence into one finite day-like a moment that changed how you saw the world, or a good dream. Recommended." - Mike Joyce, Literary Orphans Journal. "I love Campanioni's poetry . . . reminiscent of the leading Chicano poet Luis Omar Salinas. Cheekiness and delicateness all in one." - John Smelcer, Rosebud Magazine. "Campanioni captures in revelatory verse and musings, the solemnity at the crossroads of desire and reality. He reveals, in the span of a day that stretches years, continents, and cultures, the weight of his immigrant parents' expectations for a better life wrestling with his own expectations of artistic transcendence. His story reveals a struggle for relevancy in the anonymous, endless streets of New York, a city whose immigrant past mirrors the author's own. This day in the life finds Campanioni striving, through his art, through his relationships, through his tri-lingual worldview, to be a worthy successor to the brave men and women who fought to make his life a reality. Instead of fighting his fragmented identity, Campanioni's Once in a Lifetime embraces and celebrates his role as a universal man."- Jonathan Marcantoni, author of The Feast of San Sebastian and Traveler's Rest. "In Once in a Lifetime, Campanioni brings the same rhythm to his poetry as he does to his fiction. Inspired by pop culture and a love of music, Campanioni's verse is coiled in urban tension, yet remains elegantly dreamlike. Throughout the chaos and calm, his visceral jabs of imagery will take a toll, leaving not wounds but rewards." - Gregg McQueen, Manhattan Times. "If readers looked no further than the wordplay and love of language and rhythm, they'd be delighted. But there is so much going on below the surface, which I guess is also one of the author's many points. Visceral and moving." - Michael Shields, Across the Margin. "In his follow-up to the award-winning In Conversation, Campanioni doesn't just re-invent form, he tries to re-create language via a collision of cultures and pop referents. He doesn't rely on his formal tricks and the result is a poignancy and intimacy we haven't seen before. Once in a Lifetime is equal parts cut-up and confessional." - Giancarlo Lombardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, College of Staten Island & Graduate Center/CUNY. Chris Campanioni teaches literature and creative writing at Baruch College and the College of Staten Island. He was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize at Lincoln Center in 2013 for his collection, In Conversation, and his novel, Going Down, was selected as Best First Book for the 2014 International Latino Book Awards. He lives in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Find him in space here: www.chriscampanioni.com