Bücher der Reihe Via Folios

I can think of no other writer who can better express the ine able sense of being born into the working poor before moving through di erent genres of living-hired factory hand, engineer, professor, poet, then back to hired academic hand-as he searches for a sense of the real through genres of writing-memoir, ction, poetry, criticism. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure is as engrossing as any written lived experience, only more so: a meditation on what it is not to be a Hollywood celebrity, war hero, or anyone of note, but a human trying to make it, and trying to make sense of "it" as a writer who can look back and see how much of our lives are composed by the constraints of storytelling we and our societies create. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure begins with poetics, but ends as philosophy.-STEVE TOMASULA, author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Once Human: Stories

Not being a man, I bleed like this. -Bhanu Kapil, "What is the shape of your body?"

"And there was one more question posed to me, over and over again, mostly by my big-hearted, bull-headed, capa tosta of a father. It typically flew my way when the cyclone of rage and love and fear and affection ripped through the walls, shaking the everyday worlds . . . Who do you think you are?"

MISSING MADONNAS begins with the lunar arrival of its author, Gil Fagiani, who throughout this collection explores mythical Madonnas, nonnas, and urban addiction and redemption for a portrait of a life lived in pain and triumph. Dedicated to his Orlandini family, this book, first posthumous, is the final in a trilogy-CHIANTI IN CONNECTICUT and STONE WALLS-from a first generation American whose poetry transcends the conventional visions of the post-war 50's, the turbulent 60's, and the bitter tenderness of a life that ended much too soon.

Poetry. Music. Italian American Studies. forgetfulness / is food for gods / and words are too / so I sit on the sill / of this white window / and plan a house / with means I get / bricks I collect / and stare outside / anticipating works--from Father

Poetry. Italian Studies. The poems in SEASON OF SUBTRACTION are at once effortlessly attainable, and at the same time surprisingly fresh and delightfully unexpected...If you listen carefully, you can hear Michelle say, Yes, you come too. SEASON OF SUBTRACTION is an extraordinary book.--John Stanizzi The prose poems that make up SEASON OF SUBTRACTION bask in the poetics of language and syntax; they are bricks paving a dream-village, both American and Old World...I am in awe of the space Michelle Messina Reale creates: its friction, its strength, its mournful insistence, and the speaker who 'pin[s] my father's heart to the wall and pray[s] a novena to lost souls...'--Jennifer Martelli SEASON OF SUBTRACTION is like Sicily's own citrus fruits--hybridized, yet native and emblematic; sweet and intricate, yet often bitter in places at the whim of life's turning. With its nuanced language, crafted metaphors, and raw honesty, Reale's work is a treat to be savored.--Chad Frame In SEASON OF SUBTRACTION, Michelle Reale entangles you in the language of ache and need, and the search for a lost relative who becomes a found love...You will gather so many pieces in this beautiful collection, and you will exit it feeling whole, knowing what was once lost is now home.--Kailey Tedesco

Poetry. Italian Studies. In poems born of the rocky soil of the old country, where children learn to sew in a 'walled-in-garden' with 'one potted plant--crown of thorns, ' Frasca threads history and myth. She tells of immigrant hope that turns so quickly to devastating loss, and makes exile real--the self in search of the self. Writing to her counterpart, Anna, who dies young back in Sicily, and carrying her father's ghost, time feels endless, simultaneous. But Frasca is also a poet of wonder, and this work is alive, visionary, painterly. Here, myth isn't an old story, it is the art of transformation, and Frasca embodies an ever-present unfolding.--Anne Marie Macari Like mulberries that both stain and heal, these luscious poems and stories insist on our culpability in the misery of familiar or distant others while also consoling and nurturing with sensorial and sensual pleasures only a poet like Frasca, living within the tension between assimilation and alienation, between worlds that 'disorient & enlighten, ' can deliver. Frasca threads through memories wary of the ways nostalgia scars, seeking antidotes by turning writing into a 'battledress, ' and crafting introspection into a means of saving us 'from our ugly stink.' Enter WILD FENNEL's 'feral fires' and you will emerge both bruised and blessed, loving anise seeds and the smell of fox the way one should, on their own terms.--Mihaela Moscaliuc

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Italian American Studies. Talarico's true-life narratives inevitably remind you of your own best, half-buried memories.--Chicago Tribune Ross Talarico is a truly gifted poet.--James Wright Some say Ross Talarico has done the impossible.--Katie Couric In Ross Talarico's poems is distilled much of what has been best in poetry.--Donald Justice Ross Talarico has a rare talent: he captures the inner thoughts of 'ordinary' people and reveals their extraordinary visions.--Studs Terkel Talarico writes like a latter-day Wordsworth.--H.L. Hix