Book Reviews from Issue #48

Cover art by Mark Hillringhouse

Family Matter by Lawrence DiStasi

Sanniti Publications, 2019, ISBN: 978 0 965 271 462, 408 Pgs.

Reviewed by Kenneth Scambray

Lawrence DiStasi has been making significant contributions to the Italian American narrative for decades. Among his early works is Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision, a creative and fascinating study of the tradition of malocchio. DiStasi edited a collection of essays, Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II, an important and revealing account of the nearly forgotten treatment of Italian immigrants during World War II. His own essay in the collection, How World War II Iced Italian American Culture, is an insightful study of how Mussolini created fear and guilt among Italian Americans in the aftermath of the war. It would take the next generation for Italian American culture to emerge from its deep freeze.  He followed La Storia with a comprehensive look at the war years, but from another angle in, Branded: How Italian Immigrants became ‘Enemies’ during World War II. His creativity as a writer took a turn when he wrote Esty: A Novel/Memoir, a semi-autobiographical account of his mother‘s life. In Family Matter, he has returned again to his family.

Family Matter is an innovative and creative look at his Italian-Jewish heritage. While Esty focused on his mother, the Jewish side of his family, in Family Matter he pays tribute to his father, a working-class Italian immigrant from a small town near Naples. The novel’s form is inventive and challenging. The novel’s narration is told from multiple points of view: from third person to at times sections that border on stream-of-consciousness. The reader must be patient, only discovering by degrees just where a section is going and when crucial questions about the partially fictionalized DiStasi family’s history will be answered.  While the novel is autobiographical, DiStasi admits to taking liberties with some characters and events. 

There are many facets to DiStasi’s complex portrayal of his family. His father’s Italian heritage and all the characters that surround his family are mostly Italian. As a result, the dialogue is laced with all those familiar Italian expressions: mannaggia, per la Madonna, figliu mi, and sometimes a Jewish word, meshugge. His immigrant and Italian American characters also voice many of those other expressions as well that we should not publish in a family newspaper. But they are not gratuitous utterances by his characters, but rather have a place in the family discourse. More important, these expressions keep the focus of the narration on the Italian American experience, adding cultural depth to the events that challenge his too often conflicted family.

The novel begins at the end: in the hospital room where his likeable father is dying. It will end with his passing. In between, Arturo, one of the sons, is also lo scrittore, the novel’s narrator. That is, the novel, like so many other worthy Italian American novels, is Arturo’s quest to understand his family and know his father, a quest for his complex roots, Jewish and Italian.

After Arturo’s father immigrated to America, he did not go much beyond elementary school, quitting at the age of twelve. For his life’s work, he became a hairdresser in New York. When we catch up with him early in the novel, in a flashback of his life after the opening scene of the father’s rapidly failing health, he is trying to find a formula to make a permanent curl for women’s hair. He is a quixotic character who, though the family lived a comfortable life, never really achieved the American dream he pursued in America. His quest for that evasive formula is a sign of his quest in America to succeed.  To that end he works frantically in his home lab with a friend, when one day he appears to find the right formula for the permanent curl. But when they try to repeat the process, he and his friend cannot find the piece of paper amid the chaos of papers in their lab.

There are many narrative threads in the novel that carry the narration forward, departing and the refocusing on the novel’s main events. Ultimately, the focus is on Arturo’s quest for his roots, and the significance of his Italian heritage. Arturo goes to college and becomes an art professor. The core and important part of the novel becomes Arturo’s travel to Italy in search of his roots and where he is able to confront his own Italian past. One year he earns a sabbatical and departs for Naples without his family. While there he travels to his father’s village and begins his search for his father’s house. The experience he has is typical of so many Italian Americans who go to Italy searching for their roots. First, he doubts himself:  he is not sure why his has undertaken his quest or what he expects to find. Why, after all is he there? He realizes that he is separate from the very culture he always felt he was born into. His images of Italy, gleaned from his Italian American family, are not sufficient to explain the Italian culture before him. Those expletives and occasional sentences often spoken in dialect that he learned at home are not enough to bring him any closer to the modern Italian culture he experiences in Italy.  He does not speak Italian, and he struggles to find his way through the culture.

At one point he meets an Italian man, Luigi, and in their discussion they reveal one of the most interesting moments in the novel. Luigi feels that Italians are their own worst enemies. They too harbor romanticized notions of themselves and Italian culture. He tells Arturo about a local museum that contains artifacts from, of course, Italy’s Roman past. For even Italians, the museum represents an idealized view of Italian culture, the glory of old Rome. For Italians, such a notion is very dangerous. This nostalgic view of Italy’s once glorious past is what propelled Mussolini to the apex of power, and all but destroyed Italy. For both Italians and of course tourists the museum creates an unrealistic view of Italy, in the face of all of modern Italy’s problems, its economy, unemployment, and bureaucracy. Arturo shares the same idealized and unrealistic view of his heritage. When Arturo tells Luigi that the surrounding town is beautiful, Luigi agrees, “Perhaps too beautiful.”  Italy is a seductress that holds both Italians and Italian Americans like Arturo in its spell.

This becomes the underlying theme of his final escape in his father’s village. He discovers his father’s house, but there is a mysterious woman, Maddalena, and her beautiful young daughter, Lucia, who live in it. Arturo falls in love with the mysterious Lucia. As in so many of Henry James’ novels, for the unsuspecting, naïve American in Italy on the flip side of that idealized view of Italy lurks an incomprehensible evil, at least to the American. The naïve American cannot understand fully the complexity of European life and values.  Maddalena is a conniving woman, a strega, I would say, who facilitates in strange ways her daughter’s affair with Arturo.

After many twists and turns in the narration, including the arrival of Arturo’s wife in Italy, without revealing the end, suffice it to say Arturo does not achieve his dream. Both that idealized Lucia and equally idealized Italy escapes his grasp. , Chastened by his experiences, he returns to reality and goes home to America with wife and family. His father as well passes.

Like Italy’s rich and complex history, he never really answers all the questions about his own Italian past: who was that mysterious Maddalena and her beautiful daughter? What did he learn from his exploration of his roots in his father’s village? How to reconcile his idealized notions of Italy with his personal encounter with the culture and with the reality of his life in America?

These are interesting questions that DiStasi raises as do so many other Italian American novelists. These questions are at the center of much of Italian American fiction written over the last century. There is no convincing answer to any of them. DiStasi’s novel is a creative and interesting interrogation into the questions at the heart of the Italian American experience in the twenty-first century.  

This review also appeared in L'Italo-Americano in November, 2019.

Ken Scambray’s works include The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada, Surface Roots: Stories, and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel.

Lawrence DiStasi has been the project director of the exhibit, Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were ‘Enemy Aliens’ since its inception in 1994. The current Newsletter Editor/Curator of the Italian American Studies Association WRC, he has his own imprint, Sanniti Publications. His work can be seen at distasiblog.blogspot.com

What My Father Taught Me by Maria Giura

Bordighera Press, 2018) ISBN: 9781599541228; 82 pages  

Reviewed by Susan Lembo Balik                                                                              

In What My Father Taught Me, we dance with Maria Giura and her sisters in their Brooklyn living room, as they belt out “I Think I Love You” into a broken microphone. We sense the holiness in the room where her beloved stepfather lies dying, and feel the yearning of a child, who wants to be heard. In her debut collection of poems, a gorgeous volume of work, Giura speaks in a voice that is clear, tender, and authentic. We hear Giura, not just her words, but the nuance and music in her language. We hear the underpinnings of spirituality throughout the poems she crafted with her own hands, layered like one of her father’s wedding cakes with love and longing, beauty and honesty. So rich in details, we can taste them.

In the title poem, Giura introduces us to her father, a flawed man who shows love in the only way he knows how — by bringing her mother sfingi and zeppole on her name day, even though they divorced when Giura was nine, or for her and her sisters “he gave what he could: headlock kisses / 18 karat gold / the newest electronic gadgets,” and homemade birthday cakes with names written in “delicate pink icing / in his squared European handwriting.” She wrestles with what she imagines a father should teach a daughter — activities like how to play ball or dance, or practical things like how to do house repairs, talk to a repairman, or change oil or a tire. Then, she identifies childhood rituals that perhaps her father couldn’t focus long enough to do or didn’t feel was his role within a traditional Italian family reading her a bedtime story or asking about school.

Yet, the creativity and meticulous detail he displayed in designing cakes at work infused in her a desire to write, to design and cultivate her own art. She is aware that the same bakery that consumed him and made him less of a Brady Bunch kind of father inspired her own artistry, not in an overt way, but rather by absorbing the lessons through the pores of her skin over time. In the last line of the poem, she tells how she was able to bottle up that longing, and shape it into something useful by writing his story. “. . . that same bakery that stole my father from us / gave me a man / who could pay attention long enough / to make something beautiful / who helped me to / grow up / and write about him.”

Giura writes in “Papa’s Hearing” about the origins of her father’s hearing loss so vividly that his past is pounding with a rhythmic beat in our own ears. “I think about how / you left the fifth grade / to work with Nonno as a blacksmith / scorching and beating metal / hammer- ing shoes onto horses feet / and about the noise that followed / you to America /all the years that you and Mommy / owned the pastry shoppe / with its grinding industrial-strength mixers / and hissing walk-in freezers / the phone ringing off the hook.” Now, she shouts over the phone, the soccer game blasting in the background, but still he cannot hear her. She laments about the noise in his life: “. . . how it has deafened you / when all I’ve ever wanted / was for you to hear my voice.”

In “Father’s Day,” Giura writes about what it feels like to be the child of divorce — the uncertainty she felt growing up, and how she wished she was “. . . one of those young trees / just planted / whose trunks, thin as rulers / are anchored on both sides / by stakes driven into the earth / and cable so tight / not even a strong wind can undo.”

Her grandmother was one of those cables, tethering her to the earth. In “Mercy,” she writes: “Grandma who never hugged you tight / but said your name / like she was crooning it / who spoke to our clothes / as she ironed them — / bambinidiutti, sweet little babies. / She always spoke in Sicilian / the only language she knew / with its Arabic endings / the soft u at the end of the words / like an embrace.”

Her faith stitches together the fabric of this collection. In “This Room,” a powerful poem about the presence of holiness, Giura’s stepfather reaches for her hand through the bars of his hospice bed and admits: “Your feelings for God / are rubbing off on me.” When Giura says, “I will miss you,” he counters, “I’m going to be with you more.” She wants him to continue, but her young nephew enters, “stepping carefully where he would usually barrel. / Even he, three years old with blankie in tow / knows it is holy in this room.”

In “God Bless the Giura Home,” she writes about a religious plate passed down to her from her mother. “I put Jesus above the hallway closet / of my one-bedroom / where he watched / as I struggled with my calling / opened my couch to men / I didn’t love or trust.” Years later, Giura entered a convent for three years, and when she returned to her former life, she took the plate out of storage where it had been hidden away, like that part of her that had heard a calling. Instead, she made a different vow — to go for a PhD — and hung Jesus over the entrance door of another one-bedroom apartment in upstate New York. “He watched / as I studied and taught / wrote the first draft of a memoir / about me and him and the boys / I’d tried to substitute for him.”

Broken from a fall, the plate represents a crisis of faith. Two cracks snake through the words, Giura Home, while the iconic image of Jesus at the Last Supper remains intact. By the end of the poem, the plate, crazy glued back together, sits in a file drawer in her apartment in New York City, waiting to be fixed. But once something is broken, can it ever be exactly the same again? In this, her most revealing poem, Giura grapples with big questions, and finds some of the most significant answers in her faith. Though some of her questions are still mysteries, she appears to be more at peace with her own cracks or imperfections, and with not having all the answers.

Maria Giura’s second book, Celibate: A Memoir (2019, Apprentice House Press). Her writing has appeared in Prime Number, Presence, Italian Americana, Lips, and Tiferet. She has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Center for Women Writers. Maria has taught at St. John’s, Montclair State, and Binghamton University where she received her PhD.

Susan Lembo Balik is Director, Cultural Affairs at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ (home to the Poetry Center). Her first book of poetry is Sinatra, the Jeeperettes & me (Garden Oak Press, 2014), and her poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Lips, San Diego Poetry Annual, Tiferet, and other journals.

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, Martín Espada, Editor

Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-8101-4077-6, 288 pages

Reviewed by Kenneth Ronkowitz

This anthology is much more than poems about Donald Trump, though there are poems written in response to his election and his presidency. There is poetry of witness and poems polemical. Some say that all poetry is political. The poems could be divided into those written before Trump came into office and others written during his administration.

The editor, Martín Espada, might have divided the book into poems of outrage and poems of empathy. But that’s not its organization, because it’s not that easy to separate our outrage and our empathy, and we need both to survive. Still, the anthology, alphabetized by poets, has a number of poems that seem connected if the book is read cover-to-cover.

For example, there are two poems by Dante di Stefano. First, his “American Dream, 2018” that is full of anger and fears:

“...I'm afraid of likes / bombs, apps, drone strikes, swipes and hashtags, agents / of the state, pandemics, bans, placebos.” Then, on the facing page, is his poem “Cradle Song,” a kind of lullaby that comes from cradling his one-month old daughter to his chest and thinking:
“For far too few years I know you'll be safe
in our home, but after that your nation
will try to teach you its collateral
vocabularies of shackle and pledge.

Richard Mickelson’s “Fake News” invokes Trump’s claim and how his team coined “alternative facts” as a euphemism for “lies.” Mickelson sees these alternative facts in his Facebook feed and in the news on his smartphone. But what comes to mind for him is a twelfth-century murder blamed libelously by a monk on Jews, and how he later recalls that Chaucer would repeat the lie from the mouth of his Prioress. The poem reminds the reader that much of what these poets and Americans are reacting to negatively in the “age of Trump” are not things he invented. Instead, they are ugly issues that have existed for a long time but have been given new life and validity by this President’s encouragement and cowardice in not condemning them.

In “You Are Who I Love,” Aracelis Girmay’s lines make no mention of Trump, but by simply using the epigraph “January 20, 2017” her litany of all those she loves (“You who did and did not survive… who cleaned the kitchens… who the borders crossed...crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert”) brings us back to that Inauguration Day that was so lacking in love for America and the people who live here and long to live here.

Trump did not invent white supremacy. Still, in the “The School of Morning and Letters” by Chen Chen, television news is filled with “the chalky delirious face / of our leader, endorsed / by the KKK” and recalls the tragedy at Charlottesville and his tacit approval of it.

Trump did not invent prejudice against immigrants. Maria Mazziotti Gillan has been writing for decades about her own childhood shame at coming from a poor, Italian immigrant family and the prejudice she observed. In her poem “Daddy, We Called You,” she recalls her embarrassment as a young girl.

“Inside our house we spoke
a Southern Italian dialect
mixed with English
and we called you Papa
but outside again, you became Daddy
and we spoke of you to our friends
 as “my father”

But when Gillan recalls that time today, she instead sings an immigrant’s song honoring her Papa’s hard work and sacrifices for his family, so that she is “outside the house now, shouting your name.”

In “Illegal with Only Hope,” Marge Piercy speaks for another kind of immigrant.

The mother imagines [a few more
Steps, another push across a mine-
field, just one more night hiding
In rank bushes] she can carry
Her child across the border
To some kind of safety, anything
Better than what she flees...

Quotes from Shakespeare are appearing on Twitter that are 400 years old and written about a country across the pond from America, and yet they seem to be commenting on our time and place: “’Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind; The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose; Here comes a witness; The empty vessel makes the greatest sound; Indeed, they say, the senators tomorrow mean to establish Caesar as a king.”  Don Share’s excerpt from his poem “Crown Decline” begins with a line from Julius Caesar: “We, at the height, are ready to decline.” 

Current relevance is threaded through lines of poems written before the Trump era and they take on new meaning. In Jan Beatty’s new poem “Trumpcare” and her older “I Knew I Wasn't Poor,” she confronts the longtime issue of the lack of healthcare for many Americans that has only been exacerbated in the years since the 2017 inauguration.

In this anthology, there are many poems that do what artists often do; they not only express outrage, but they embody empathy. Martín Espada writes in the Preface, “…this is not simply a collection of grievances or denunciations. The poets build bridges.”

Laurie Ann Guerrero’s “Ars Politica: How to Make Art” is “an ode to the artists of San Antonio, Tejas” who, like artists of many countries, cultures and forms participate in:
the weaving of experience
...love-making in the cotton and nopal,
 battle lines and color lines birthing in the huts, in the casitas
under a grove of mesquite and huizache,
and, too, lynchings and genocide in the feathery strands
of our DNA that move our hands to do the work
Trust your hands know the work
even if you do not know the work.
You do not speak for the dead.
The dead speak for you.

Sometimes sadness and hope exist in one poem, as is the case in “Ghazal: America the Beautiful” by Alicia Ostriker. Reading that title and thinking about America written in a traditionally Middle Eastern form immediately adjusts our focus. Ostriker begins:

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America
The Beautiful along With The Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America
We put our hands over our first-grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

But her patriotism changes, as she grows up and as the America that is repeated at the end of each couplet changes.

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America
We comprehend it now, this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Of course, those who are older and have lived through a half dozen administrations have also learned these things, but some, having perceived positive changes in recent years, are now seeing the nation regress rather than progress. Still, Ostriker ends with a perhaps-irrational hope.

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

In the poem by Bruce Weigl that gives the collection its title, “What Saves Us,” he writes that “We are not always right about what we think will save us.” But the heart of this anthology is that it is clearly telling us what will not save us: our silence.

Jane Hirshfield asks in her poem, “Let Them Not Say,” that difficult question that has been heard more and more in the past four years and will be asked by generations that come after us: When it was happening, what did you do about it?

Let them not say:     we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say:     we did not hear it.
We heard.

Kenneth Ronkowitz is a lifelong educator. His poetry is anthologized in The Paradelle, The Practicing Poet and The Crafty Poet, and appears in English Journal, Tiferet, Lips, Paterson Literary Review and on The Writer’s Almanac.  Since 1998, he has edited PoetsOnline.org.

Martín Espada’s many books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Alone at the Border by Albert Tacconelli

Finishing Line Press, 2018 ISBN: 9781635346626; 30 Pages

Reviewed by Antoinette Libro

Albert Tacconelli’s Alone at the Border is a poet’s striking response to the Syrian Civil War.

Here you will find poems as sharp and biting as the brutal realities that punctuate the daily lives of these persecuted people—compelling, compassionate poems that capture the atrocities, question man’s inhumanity to man, and cry out for mercy

The chapbook is divided into four parts: “Alone at the Border,” “Perhaps Something,” “Ad Nauseam,” and “White Tents,” each part beginning with a poem of the same name. Throughout the four parts, Tacconelli dramatizes the dreadful conditions that characterize the civil war, employing  rhetorical questions and the use of personification to address Syria in an up-close and personal, intimate fashion, as in the poem “Cold Hands.”

O suffering Syria
parents weep; sons,
daughters drown
in their own blood.
Who hears the cry?

And again, in “Huddle Rubble,” he implores:

O Syria, once lovely
who comes to your aid?

Tacconelli heightens the intensity of these poems with short, staccato lines that become all the more poignant as we realize that there is no resolution, no ready answer, no end in sight. Here, in “What Grief,” anaphora is used effectively, as successive lines begin with and repeat the same words and phrases to dramatic effect.

O Syria, once lovely.
O Syria, tears of blood.
O Syria, madness without end.

In “Perhaps Something,” perhaps one of the strongest poems in the book, the harsh sounds and disturbing sights of war are further amplified by the underlying effects of assonance and consonance in this descriptive passage:

Perhaps something familiar will be found;
tatter of cloth, splinter of furniture.
Surely buried beneath crumpled
concrete, plaster and twisted steel
lie scattered scraps of loved ones lost.

Such striking and frightful imagery appear throughout the poems, as in “the bombs overhead” in “My Son Remembers” and the “bloodied gloves” in ”So Close.” Indeed, blood and bloody images reoccur throughout the work, starkly contrasting with the imagery of white tents from the poem by the same name in the last section of the book. Here Tacconelli paints the world that these displaced families see, the world they are forced to inhabit, a world of “white tents.” With his ever present artist’s eye and poet’s sensibility at work, he writes:

On the mother’s lap a child sits, quietly wondering
why the world is white tents
brilliant white tents, crenulated sea of white tents.

Alone at the Border is an eloquent lament for the persecuted people of Syria, as in the title poem that opens the book, where a “weary young man,” bereaved and bereft, finds himself alone at the border, in a desert that is both literal and figurative. The horror of a prolonged war is brought to every page, while the incremental effect of the poems creates an immense sadness. But ironically, escape from the afflictions of war, the “stray bullets” and “poisoned gas” in the poem “Four Wings” also manages to lead us to the poet’s ultimate vision.

Four arms, four wings spread wide
                            soar high above Syria,
safe from harm, eternally at peace.”

Here transcendence at last arrives. And the final poem in the book softens the tone further while offering some solace, suggesting that a higher power may be present in the war torn world, despite the deafening silence mentioned in the epigraph at the beginning of the book, from Isaiah: “ Can you remain silent, and afflict us so severely?” and found ironically, in that smallest of creatures, in the poem “Little Sparrow.”

God loves sparrows
knows sparrows by
name, my name too.

Alone at the Border is a spiritual foray into the human misery that the Syrian people have had to endure. In each of these sometimes delicate, sometimes brutal poems, we find the wrenching reality that we’d love to hide from, but instead, come face to face with, and bow our heads in recognition, perhaps even finding ourselves at these bloodied borders. Indeed, as with all fine poetry, this work rises above the particular into the universal, hence the existential genius of the title, Alone at the Border, since we are all, at the end, alone at the border. You owe it to yourself to read this book and experience an emotional journey that will borrow deep into your consciousness, bound to stay. And you too will say: Yes, Syria, I hear your cry.

Antoinette (Toni) Libro won Third Prize in the national Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest in 2011, as well as HM & EC awards. Her chapbook of poetry, The Carpenter’s Lament in Winter, was published by Finishing Line Press, 2016. She Coordinates the Beach Bards Poetry & Prose Reading Series in Sea Isle City and retired as Professor Emerita from Rowan University.

Al Tacconelli’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies. He has read at Hofstra University, Calandra Institute, Free Library of Philadelphia. Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contests awarded Honorable Mention and Editor’s Choice. Poetry books; Bordighera (2014) Perhaps Fly. Alone at the Border (2018) Finishing Line. Twenty One Poems (2018) Rosa Press.