Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mary Melfi walks a tightrope through Welcome to Hard Times, her eighth collection of poetry and first in over twenty years.To one side is the past: a lifetime of triumph and frustration, love won and lost.On the other, a present any of us might recognize: a stultifying regime of economic unease, emotional disconnection, and general malaise.To suggest Melfi steps lightly between these worlds is, perhaps, inaccurate; rather, she bounds along the tightrope, careening from side to side, only ever one small slip from the abyss.As readers, all we can do is try to keep up.The effect is dizzying, electric, a rousing return to the poetic form by one of our most versatile Italian-Canadian writers.For Melfi, poetry is performance.She has organized her 111 new poems into the phases of a theatrical production, taking us from "Casting Call" to "Curtain Call." Each poem is titled after a play or film from the 1970s or earlier.Readers looking for a well-defined link between a poem's title and its subject matter are out of luck; for the most part, the connection, if any, is tenuous -a link to be forged by readers themselves.It is tempting to read this intertextual web as a commentary on artifice, on the contrived unreality of all artistic endeavour -but that's not the whole story.Melfi sees performance as a profoundly humanistic act, going so far as to thank, in the acknowledgements, everyone in the theatre and film industries who create "stories which entertain, inspire and tell the truth about the human experience." By putting her work in conversation with theatre and film, she invites readers to envision the poem as monologue: a moment of dramatic tension between personal and public spheres.In these poems, Melfi grapples with the diverse themes that have animated her career.We witness class struggle, the trauma of migration, the broken promises of capitalism and multiculturalism.We catch glimpses of -almost intrude upon -the poet's "flesh-eating anxiety" ("Lovers and Lunatics"), her attempts to reconcile multiple identities: artist, worker, wife, then widow; lover, daughter, mother, and more ... and the fallout when those identities collide.Along the way, we are introduced to a cast of characters with enough personality to fill a much longer volume: an overbearing mother, God Himself, the devil, a series of ill-fated lovers (to which we owe the sublime lines, "You are forgotten like water is forgotten / when a woman drowns" in "Love me or Leave Me").As we approach "Opening Night, " a son appears, the star of some of the collection's brightest pieces ("A Lesson in Love, " "The Sun
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.522 | 0.322 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".