Book Reviews from the 2022 Issue #50
Reviewed by Dominic Candeloro
Mezzogiorno in Chicago: Love and Trouble on Ogden Avenue, by Albert P. Melone
Publisher: Branden Books, Boston, 2016
Mezzogiorno in Chicago by Albert Melone is an engrossing novel set on Chicago’s West Side (Taylor Street Neigborhood) from 1907 to the 1970s. It follows the saga of the Russo family and their migration from Pizzoli in the Gran Sasso (Abruzzo) to Chicago. The settings for the action include the Near West Side, Hull House, Colosimo’s café, Holy Family Church, and the three-flat on Ogden that finally secured the family’s fortunes. The thirty-three-chapter narrative touches on arranged marriages, labor organizing, religion, L’ordine della famiglia, small business strategies, the Great Depression, Mussolini, Jane Addams, Italo Balbo’s arrival, and much more.
Dominic Russo is the first to migrate to Chicago where he shows a. picture of his sister to Frankie, a Neopolitan co-worker, who falls in love with the picture and offers to pay her passage and marry her. An arrangement is made that includes passage for the mother as well. Meanwhile, Frankie is called away and Rachela and her mother arrive in Chicago and Rachela becomes involved with another young man whom she met at a Hull House English class. Conflicts and some violence ensue, along with the growth and development of the female protagonists in the whirl of Chicago politics, labor struggles, and prohibition.
The narrative is chock-full of references to events and personalities in the Italian American experience on both the local and national levels. Melone weaves discussion of the New Orleans Massacre of 1891, Woodrow Wilson’s disdain for Italians, Mother Cabrini, Joe DiMaggio, and many other topics into the narrative to add context and perspective to the family story of persistence and moderate success. Al Capone makes a cameo appearance as a customer of the grocery-deli that the family owned.
As a person who has specialized in the history of Italians in Chicago for the past 40 years, I welcome Mezzogiorno in Chicago to list of fictional works in this field. Of course, Tina DeRosa’s Paper Fish offers a masterful literary treatment of the period 1940-60’s. Billy Lombardo’s Logic of the Rose: Chicago Stories and Tony Romano’s When the World Was Young and If You Eat, You Never Die are autobiographical writings from a later period. Much of the award-winning work of Tony Ardizzone (In the Name of the Father, Taking It Home, and In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu) was auto-biographical from a later date. Steven Decker’s novel Cambridge Street focuses on the Near North Sicilian neighborhood in the 1920s
Melone handles the dialog of his characters very well. He does not attempt to recreate the slang of the period, but he strategically uses Italian terms. On almost every page there is an Italian term or slang that brings me back to my childhood days in Chicago Heights--- “Mannagia l’America,” “cafone,” “nonno,””stronzo,””schifoso,” “capisci,” “pazzo,” “la famiglia.” This literary device gave the story-telling a flair of Italianita` and authenticity to my reading of the book.
The book highlights the tension that existed between old Italian village culture and the Chicago realities, between family values and American individualism, and changes in gender roles. Rachela is the heroine of the story---well-educated, quick to learn English, and eager to take on business ventures. The women in the book are major protagonists. The book tells the unromantic story of how immigrants got ahead---They worked really hard, never refused overtime, saved up money, partnered with family members to buy a three-flat with storefronts, and after about 50 years, lived happily ever after. This book reveals the unglamorous details of immigrant life as they accumulated social capital and slowly turned it into economic mobility---a reality that too many of us take for granted.
What makes this novel even more admirable to me is that Albert Melone undertook the writing as a 10-year labor of love. Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Melone has authored a long list of publications on the U.S. Supreme Court, The Constitution, and political science topics. Cobbling together fragments of family history and doing research on Chicago’s Italians, Professor Melone has added literature’s truth to the historical record, to create a fine contribution to Chicago-style italianita`.
Review by Penny Perry
Searching for Dandelion Greens by Valarie Hastings
Publisher: Garden Oak Press
Searching for Dandelion Greens [Garden Oak Press, 2021], by Valarie Hastings (Honorable Mention: the Allen Ginsberg Prize 2020), is a mesmerizing collection of 90 poems. This gifted storyteller creates images that will stay in readers’ minds as she observes the way we humans love and betray each other. Her poems are brave, honest, and as intimate as a letter to a best friend.
In “I Would’ve Had Some Other Version of You, That’s All,” a life story floats like casual gossip:
“My mother says this at the dinner table,
after the fourth or fifth glass of wine is emptied
and the light in the room has turned sad. She’s
talking about the dark, rich boy from Italy, the one she
should’ve married. I already know this story. . . ”
The title poem captures the thoughts and actions of an elderly Syrian refugee:
“Pulling up these tender roots, shaking loose the dark soil
I know in my heart I was a girl once
my grandmother beside me.”
Memories real and made up construct many of these well-crafted poems. “Genealogy”reaches back to a future foreseen:
“At the moment of my birth my great grandmother
was in the middle of a dream about birds, dressed
in the white gown they buried her with, on the day
of my grandmother’s 16th birthday.”
“Love Poem in a Pandemic” tenderly recounts a husband and wife reconnecting:
“the heart’s engines kick up again
throw their butterfly wings into the belly.”
Poem titles figure in the storytelling. Both “To the Stranger Who Sexually Assaulted Me” and “The Man Who Forgot His Baby Daughter”offer titles that reveal chunks of their stories. “Now We Are Six and a Half” uses its title to steer the reader into the poem's center:
“You take me in with those enormous
blue things my father gave us both, that give
us both away.”
Meticulous details connect these diverse poems — from families (and murders!) to lost childhood friends and movie stars — creating photographs in an album of yearning for the past and wishing to hold onto the present. Small details generate resounding echoes.
In “Anticipatory Grief,” the narrator picks a rose for her mother:
“. . .An early frost pulls the green off
their fragile black limbs, tears open their heart in a red burst”
In “Moon Diver,” after a frightening fire:
“…the wolf moon splits blue against our window.”
When Pigs Could Fly earned the 2020 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, with San Diego Poet Laureate Ron Salisbury judging. Here, the preposterous becomes normal — a satire, I think, of the Trumpian years:
“The first wave came in undulating V-formations, piglets tiny as pugs
drifting over streets in Minneapolis. . .in late spring.”
Searching for Dandelion Greens is a feast, full of love and empathy. With the grit of a survivor and the knowledge of lessons learned, Hastings has given us, in her first collection, a book that will start your own heart’s engine running again, butterfly wings and all.
Reviewed by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
Fan Mail by Joey Nicoletti
Publisher: Broadstone Books
These poems crack like crisp base hits across the page. Joey Nicoletti’s “Fan Mail” is a book of fifty-two epistolary poems written to baseball players and icons, the saints of the poet as a young man, confiding intimate plot points of his family’s Neopolitan American history. Nicoletti created a dream assignment for himself: write a full deck of poems to baseball players who shaped him – fifty-two, the number of cards in a deck of playing cards, and as many dreams as the hand can hold.
Moments in baseball make you feel you are part of an American miracle full of hope and striving. “Fan Mail” captures the divine flight of the baseball into glory when a player meets his destiny in union with the path of one ball at the perfect point in spacetime. Baseball helped shape the hopes and dreams of immigrant families who transplanted their lives in America in one or another team’s parish. The promise of America shines bright in this collection, “...sunlight sprayed / the outfield of possibility.” America’s shadow appears too.
These poems pay attention to several strata of consciousness. It is the existential voice here I most love. The inquiries of the life of la famiglia buff and spit-shine this collection. Nicoletti asks of player Dave Kingman: “...why / do I feel so connected / to someone I’ve never met?” And this one line, so important, in the poem “To Bick Allen”— “I too am in search of something new / (a beautiful world I’m trying to find.)” Nicoletti hits the sweet spot of his poetic Louisville Slugger here, quoting an Eryka Badu lyric in the parenthetical as the poet whispers in the reader’s ear. Isn’t this what we’re all after, all of us? I hear the poet’s soul speaking, seeking.
Nicoletti’s consciousness encompasses race, police brutality, immigration, war, and national and international crises. George Floyd is here, as is Michael Brown. In “To Dick Allen,” Nicoletti writes: “And though I could never / go yard like you / or have any idea / what it’s like / or how it feels / to be black in America—“
Immigrants are here. War veterans are here. Rusty Staub is lauded for helping “the widows and children / of 9/11 first responders / pay their bills.” The COVID-19 pandemic descends, “in these uncertain days / which has exposed / how vulnerable / all of us are /and always have been.”
All fifty-two players are connected to the poet’s roots. They are in his baseball card collection, some he saw when his Uncle Michael took him to stadiums. Uncle Michael who suffered damage from Agent Orange in Viet Nam. Other players his Grandfather Joe admired: “Grandfather Joe himself / who went from driving / a Sherman tank / in The Battle of Normandy / to driving a bus / in every borough / of New York City.” Some players inspired the poet as a youth, like Dwight Evans, a Boston Red Sox outfielder who “gunned down Sweet Lou Piniella,” a moment which made the poet question his identity: “had my mother’s parents / not been estranged / from their Boston family members; / had I grown up there or anywhere.” Here too are players like Lee Mazzilli who, “Both of my parents adored,” parents who argued, divorced, and who are now united in the poet’s eternal memory with a sweet celebration of a paesano baseball healer icon. Mazzilli was Brooklyn Barese.
Legends and noteworthy players populate these pages from across America, Toronto, and the Negro League. Each poem’s title is addressed to a player. The 25th poem in the collection is devoted “To Satchell Paige” who wore the number 25 on his Kansas City Monarchs jersey. This poem breaks open in form across the page, a turning point in the book as impactful as Hall of Famer Paige was to the game. Baseball stats and slang add sharp edges to the lines of these poems, showing the poet’s deep passion of the game. Baseball is Nicoletti’s mother tongue.
A “sense of belonging” infuses the spirit of the poet as a youth trading baseball cards. He confides in baseball player saints about the parallels he sees in their lives on and off the field, and the lives of his Neopolitan American family: his father healing from a broken back, Nonna Ida’s “gnarled hands,” Nonno Giovanni’s “spirited Italian.”
We are born into baseball allegiances. In my own Bronx Italian family, team insignias are knitted in baby blankets and feature in funeral flower arrangements. The ball, our soul. The ball, our lives. Our hope infused in nine innings. Nicoletti goes so far as to state his final wishes in “To Paul Blair” where his adept style of finishing poems in gorgeous memorable images slams hard as he offers us his last will and testament: “I want my body to be viewed / with the baseball you signed / in my cold, stiff hands before / I become smoldering ash.”