Originally from Brampton, Ontario, Alessandro Porco is a doctoral student (ABD) at the State University of New York at Buffalo; he is writing his dissertation on hip-hop poetics and American poetry. He writes an online hip-hop column, “In Extremis,” for Maisonneuve, Montreal’s city magazine. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems (2008) and The Jill Kelly Poems (2005), both published by ECW Press. Porco regularly contributes to a variety of journals and magazines, including Canadian Notes & Queries, OpenBook Toronto, Arc, Matrix, Quill & Quire, Mansfield Revue, and Northern Poetry Review.