Skeleton Mine Disaster, by Ryan Di Francesco

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Skeleton Mine Disaster follows a speaker moving through dream and daylight with equal clarity: a snail gnawing at the temple, an unplugged moon still “plugged in to the wall,” a half-eaten Honeycrisp glossed by a fly, the dull fluorescents of service work and waiting rooms. Across lineated lyrics and hybrid, diaristic pieces, Ryan Di Francesco charts panic and tenderness inside contemporary life—addiction and long sobriety, insomnia at 3 a.m., cheap carpets and neon, the ache of caregiving and the stubbornness of love. The poems refuse grand pronouncements in favor of precise, lived textures: a dustpan in a bathroom mirror, a lorazepam on a dresser, FM radio in a kitchen where anger has just been served. What emerges is a lucid anti-romance of the everyday, where terror and mercy share a single breath.

The book’s title becomes a lens: the “mine” as workplace, as body, as mind; the “disaster” both private and communal. Set against Toronto streets and Niagara kitsch, Di Francesco’s images move from blunt humor to bruised awe, from slot-machine glare to the soft thud of a dog sleeping at dawn. Voices speak plainly— sometimes bitter, sometimes laughing—while the world around them frays: “everything is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” the speaker insists, even as the day tilts toward breakdown. In these pages, love is a task and a vow; language, a tool for lifting rubble; and beauty, when it arrives, is provisional but real.

Formally restless, Skeleton Mine Disaster splices lyric concentration with narrative drift, collage, and the occasional anti-poem feint. The result is a field guide to surviving the ordinary apocalypse: closing the window so no more insects get in, finishing the coffee, waking the beloved from a nightmare, and writing it down before the light changes. 

Ryan Di Francesco is a Canadian writer and teacher. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Shadow and Sax, an emerging literary magazine, where his poetry and short fiction have appeared. His chapbook, The Paper Hound, was published by Alien Buddha Press. His poems and stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Toronto Star, The Pit Periodical, Ink in Thirds, Juste Milieu Zine, Low Hanging Fruit, Bicoastal Review, Bitter Melon, Rawhead, SHINE Quarterly, SQUID Magazine, Azarão, Emerge Literary Journal, The Orange Rose, The Amphibian, The Page Gallery, and others. He also co-wrote the indie film Streets of Wonderland, which won multiple festival awards.