Bøker av Marisa Frasca

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. "In poems of remarkable fortitude and clarity, Marisa Frasca, a self-described "hyphenated woman," navigates the passages, geographical and psychological, that allow her uneasy flow between Sicily and America, among all 'our known / and unknown mothers.' This journey in which the Atlantic transforms into 'the old dark and narrow hallway of the immigrant' is always less familiar than we might anticipate as these poems conflate past and present, 'the displaced, the incomplete, / the made new / superimposed and piled together in chorus.' Like Nino Rota, Frasca conveys depths of sorrow and wonder in her rich, musical phrasings. The poems of VIA INCANTO are operatic with breath and sex and thirst and love."--Michael Waters "Frasca's vision and passion are so arrived, so rich with variation, that they elevate us inside a lyric adventure. Vittorini's 'twice real' reveries and Pavese's story-poem architectures whisper like companions to Frasca's native and chosen places: Sicily, the Atlantic, her beloved Manhattan--all fueling the book's narrative aesthetic and elegant shapes. But her darkroom--part time-capsule, part temple--steals everything. It tests the heart with fire and compression, and it tests all of us with razor-sharp memory. Then it gives back a shining array of immortal human faces and stories, indelibly. VIA INCANTO is a luminous original."--Judith Vollmer