Italian American Women Writers: Forging Identities Through a Shared Immigrant Heritage: Poetry

Lifetime activist and American Book Award-winning author, founder/editor of Eco-Poetry.org, Daniela Gioseffi offers humanity -- children of Mother Gaia, fellow citizens of home planet Earth -- a wake-up call in the face of climate crisis emergency "because you still have some hours left."

In her fourth book of poetry, this Canadian author of Italian ancestry returns to the themes of immigration and memory that characterised her first book. Gutsy and direct, her voice is also tender and humorous as her poems create small portraits of people in the midst of daily life.

"Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity." - Allen Ginsberg "With di Prima's selected poems,Pieces of a Song . . . we have a chance to examine the powerful gifts this deeply imaginative poet has to offer us . . . ." --Jack Foley, Poetry Previews (website) "A prolific writer generally associated with the Beat Generation, di Prima deserves wider recognition." --Library Journal "She is not about to be regarded merely as a literary figurehead, but as an ongoing contributor to the arts--a presence whose voice continues to positively impact those who listen, as it has for the last half-century." --Verbicide Magazine Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry,The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.

In The Bread We Ate, Ferrarelli continues the work begun in Dreamsearch (malafemmina) and Home is a Foreign Country (Eadmer) of putting into words her own struggles with displacement and loss, with the language and culture - misinterpretations and misidentification - but also those of the people who came before. As the one educated in English, she took it upon herself to honor and remember the lives of those who had come before and who had paved the way with their hard work, to speak for those who could not speak for themselves. Drawing from the past and the present, she gives us vivid individual portraits set in a community of shared values and shared ideals, "matching new bricks with the old, /blending the colors to look good."

Vittoria repetto is a subtle poet who has preserved her working class sensibility and her taste for the actual language of daily life while maintaining an acute ear for literary echoes. From the first poem where she places her grandparents young and in love right in front of us, to 'she's doing the dishes' where in a tongue in cheek delivery she eroticises a simple household chore to the last poem 'not just a personal ad,' Vittoria repetto casts an unapologetically direct and witty eye on life's complexity. These are poems that paint unforgettable moments within unforgettable scenes.

Poetry. Art. "In PACKS SMALL PLAYS BIG, Phyllis Capello gives us exquisite, finely-crafted lyrical poems, polished and many-faceted as the finest jewels. These poems contain a woman's voice crying out from tenement windows and city streets. They both grieve for all that is lost to the passage of time and celebrate all that remains."--Maria Mazziotti Gillan "PACKS SMALL PLAYS BIG packs a punch to the gut. Whether it's a feminist reclamation of myth and fable, an activist's prophetic cries of injustice, or the elusive compression of an attuned lyric poet, Capello offers measured solace and rousing intensity. Where else but with this poet's magic can bewitched urban landscapes of 'alarm jangles' and 'jabbering pizzicato' transform into redemptive homemade shrines--notwithstanding the 'patched potholes' and 'pedestrian plod.' The poems 'spark and hum' and the emotion catches our throats."--Peter Covino "An exquisite redefinition of Time. The poet's meditation brings ancient sensibility to the urban landscape, Delos to the 'steel horizon,' Athena to Avenue X. Through stars, dreams, shoelaces, women on the brink keening in tune with sirens, gears, brakes, the lurch of subways overhead, Capello burnishes an eternal lemniscate brimmed with passion."--Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

Poetry. Italian American Studies. Maria Mazziotti Gillan's Ancestors' Song takes the reader on a journey, one in which she recognizes deep within herself "the voices of the women who came before," their words blending together, forming, as she tells the reader, "the beat I move to." This beat is very much a part of the narrative she weaves in her characteristically honest, intimate, and humorous voice. This beat is true, hard working, strong; a beat that began in the villages on the mountaintops in San Mauro, Italy, and continues to the present day, illuminating the path for those that will follow. These poems will move you to laughter, to tears, and a mixture of both, and are proof that Gillan is at the peak of her career. She is truly one of America's most beloved poets.

LA BELLA FIGURA: A CHOICE, a selection of poetry & Prose which appeared in various issues of LA BELLA FIGURA: THE LITERARY JOURNAL DEVOTED TO ITALIAN-AMERICAN WOMEN, is the first full-length anthology from Malafemmina Press. Its purpose being to promote Italian Americana, each piece is descriptive of Italian-American culture & heritage; thus it serves both as a way to enlighten those who know little of Italian-American issues & also to contribute to a beginning of, & a legitimization of, Italian-American literature. In her introduction, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, highly regarded author of several scholarly works about Italian American culture, says: "Our task is to try to remember our own history, & then, along with all the other uprooted others, transform culture & politics. This anthology of the best Italian-American poets & writers of our time is a very good beginning." This book, which includes the work of several writers whose books from Malafemmina Press are used in multicultural literature classes in universities across the country, will itself be sought for such classes. Published by Malafemmina Press, it's distributed by Lincoln Springs Press ($8.95), P.O. Box 269, Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. An urban songline of New York. From the author of the memoir L is for Lion, comes a panegyric of the geology of Manhattan. These poems glitter. Manhattan schist is rendered as a template for the skyline and characters of New York. Grit and stardust collide in this debut collection of poetry and song. The book begins with the bright reflective quality of Mica and ends with the gentrified vision of the city where "New York is nine millions doors, and you have not one key." In between are stories of urban icons: iceman, fish peddler, heart butcher, meter maid, San Gennaro, the magic of grandmothers' hands, the vision of the oldest living tree in the city, immigrants who fell out windows and died in explosions, Italian phrases that link the essence of the sun to a rose to a heart, crushed tomatoes, sunsets, supermarkets, the glory of hot tar, the lessons of marines and lesbians. You will learn history and geology, Italian American heroes, and spiritual imperatives, through the syllables of this one poet's soul.