The Polyglot is proud to publish Gian Marco Visconti’s debut chapbook, Perpetual Prayer.

“In Perpetual Prayer, Gian Marco Visconti invites readers into an intimate, hallowed space that imbues them with awe as though they were standing in the halo refracted by stained glass, a space to meditate on the mundane—even as the mundane is the stuff of life and love, longing and loss, identity and heritage—as well as the spiritual. A space where language is a tapestry of memories, language is held in reverence—a reverence for language captured in his poetry, prismatic as it is polyphonic, reflective of his awareness of human fragility. As we ponder each poem in his chapbook, Visconti leaves us with images as fragile as a raindrop, a stem, yet impacting as a glance shared between two strangers pausing in the street to say hello.”

— Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, author of there’s more

Gian Marco Visconti is an Arbëreshë and South Asian–Canadian writer, librarian, and urbanist, born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. He received the Glass Buffalo English Poetry Prize in 2016 and the SAAG Writing Prize in 2019. He was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2018 and a finalist for the Alberta Magazine Award for Poetry in 2023. Gian Marco writes mostly in English while weaving elements of his heritage languages (Italian, Gujarati, and Arabic) into his poetic work, taking inspiration from the aesthetics of collage art to combine disparate expressions and materials into new forms.