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Where I Come from
A great selection from a fine New Jersey poet.
Things My Mother Told Me
This book is luminous, feisty, heart breaking, and fiercely honest, often all in the space of a single poem. Her voice has the vigour and industrial strength grit of Grace Paley's, and there is genuine wisdom here, an intelligence born of direct experience. These poems are a breath of fresh air in contrast to the fetid self obsession of so much contemporary verse... a real pleasure...a must read for anyone who has ever experienced the deep joys, agonies, and mysteries of the mother, daughter bond.
Unsettling America
A multicultural array of poets explore what it is means to be American This powerful and moving collection of poems stretches across the boundaries of skin color, language, ethnicity, and religion to give voice to the lives and experiences of ethnic Americans. With extraordinary honesty, dignity, and insight, these poems address common themes of assimilation, communication, and self-perception. In recording everyday life in our many American cultures, they displace the myths and stereotypes that pervade our culture. Unsettling America includes work by: Amiri Baraka Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Rita Dove Louise Erdich Jessica Hagedorn Joy Harjo Garrett Hongo Li-Young Lee Pat Mora Naomi Shihab Nye Marye Percy Ishmael Reed Alberto Rios Ntozake Shange Gary Soto Lawrence Ferlinghetti Nellie Wong David Hernandez Mary TallMountain ...and many more.
The Silence in an Empty House
Poetry. In THE SILENCE OF AN EMPTY HOUSE, Maria Mazziotti Gillan comes to the limit of human experience, stares death in the face, and struggles to keep moving. These moments she faces and speaks of so clearly are unavoidable, and the long illness and death of her husband, Dennis, is her personal version of the fundamental struggle we all face. THE SILENCE OF AN EMPTY HOUSE speaks of forgiveness, guilt and grace. With courage and a stubborn refusal to look away from the terrors that surround her on so many levels, Gillan documents the parallels between our own struggles with mortality and the struggles being played out on the world stage today. From wars to climate change to the death of whole species to her own struggles with the deaths of her husband, family and friends, she makes each of these battles the reader's own, and gives order and meaning to those fundamental things that otherwise threaten to capsize us.
What We Pass on
In WHAT WE PASS ON: COLLECTED POEMS: 1980-2009, Maria Mazziotti Gillan weaves a tapestry of one woman's life wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, grand-daughter, Italian American. Reading these poems in one volume makes us acutely aware of how memory is layered, each new poem adding another detail, another color, another perspective so that we watch as the poet and the people around her change. With increasing clarity and honesty, Gillan peels away all the self-protective layers and invites us in so we can see in her story a reflection of our own. Her work in all its texture and exuberance, its passion and power, forces us to care about what matters and teaches us to be human. This is a poet who, in these courageous poems, teaches us why poetry matters and why it can change us."
Italian Women in Black Dresses
Italian Women in Black Dresses reads like a memoir, detailing the life of a family across generations and giving us a moving and haunting portrait of the Italian mother who is the center around which this family revolves. The mother's stories and words shape the lives of her daughter and granddaughter, but this book is about much more than ethnicity. Gillan's work succeeds in transcending any single identity category and explores instead the multiple ways in which each of us learns to identify him or herself.
All that Lies Between Us
From the author of "Italian Women in Black Dresses", "Things My Mother Told Me" and "Where I Come From" comes this new volume that continues the memoir in poetry that Maria Mazziotti Gillan has been constructing. Here we find the geography of the heart's home -- not a physical but rather an emotional center around which she constructs the story of her life. Her world is populated by memories of growing up in the 1950s, her courtship and long marriage, her husband's illness, her children and grandchildren. But, at its centre, is the woman she has become who struggles to deal with all the complexities of love and the difficulties of achieving compassion and tenderness in the face of adversity. Brave, honest, flat-out beautiful, these poems help us to understand what it means to be human.
The Place I Call Home
Poetry. The place that Maria Mazziotti Gillan calls home is a universal haven built of enduring memories and peopled by loving family. In Gillan's newest book of poetry, THE PLACE I CALL HOME, we share her complex emotions of an immigrant childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1950s, her long marriage, her husband's devastating illness, and her subsequent widowhood. Yet, we also share the sheltering family in which she grew up, the deep love binding her and her husband, the unfolding of her life as a mother and grandmother, and, most of all, her resilient spirit. She reminds us that even when the bud of youthful na?vet? flowers into the reality of an uncaring universe, we are home again w...
Identity Lessons
In stories and poems that explore how our society shapes us, Identity Lessons features a wide array of ethnic perspectives on growing up in America. Leading the reader into the living-rooms, boardrooms, classrooms, and movie houses of America, distinguished writers from all points of the American ethnic landscape shed light on the space between conformity and difference, and examine the struggle between the need to belong and the pull of one's cultural roots. With insight, wit, and poignancy, the contributors to this anthology recall their attempts to reconcile family from the old country with the powerful messages about race, gender and class confronting them in their new surroundings. A collection of superb and moving writing, Identity Lessons deconstructs conceptions of personal and national identity, and forms an indispensable primer for understanding our cultural selves.
