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Where I Come from
A great selection from a fine New Jersey poet.
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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
The work of one of the leaders of the multicultural turn in North American poetry is examined in this literary critique. In these essays, Tony Vallone explicitly examines the Italian-Americanness of Maria Mazziotti Gillan's prosody and childhood, while Joe Weil attempts to place her work in relation to a number of schools of American poetics, political ideologies, and autobiography. Rachel Guido DeVries articulates the Italian-American feminist ingredients of Gillan's poems, and editor Sean Thomas Dougherty reads her work through contemporary theories of whiteness, class formation, and resistance. In a personal yet critical essay, daughter Jennifer Gillan exhumes the role of kin and kinship networks in her mother's poetry.
When the Stars Were Still Visible
Mari Mazziotti Gillan's new book, When the Stars were Still Visible, asks us to "remember." In her example, memories start "on the back steps of the six-family tenement / on 5th Avenue in Paterson" in 1944, her father dressed "as a devil for a costume party / at the Società Cilentana"; this opens "so many memories" which "swirl / like bits of color in a kaleidoscope": of Mrs Gianelli "who always fainted when she got upset" and of "Zio Guillermo's garden / with tomatoes and zucchini and corn" which is "years later / covered with asphalt and garages." The poet tells us that "children of immigrants pick up bits and pieces / over the years to create a picture" ("The Children of Immigrants"), that "On the street where I grew up / everyone knew everyone else. / We knew each other's secrets" ("Carrying Their Hometowns to Paterson"), and, invoking Eliot, that they wore faces that they presented to the world. She writes about her people, her community, and the comfort of soothing things "beckoning me home" ("Even After All These Years"), the way, perhaps, that all poetry should.
Italian American Writers on New Jersey
This anthology gathers fiction, poetry, memoirs, oral histories, and journalistic pieces by some of the best writers to chronicle the Italian American experience in the Garden State. These works focus on ethnic identity and the distinctive culture of New Jersey, which has long been home to a large and vital Italian American community. Filled with passion, humor, and grace, these writings depict a variety of experiences, including poignant but failed attempts at conformity and the alienation often felt by ethnic Americans. The authors also speak of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities and the realization that it is often the appreciation of their heritage that hel...
