Download or read book Writing Poetry to Save Your Life written by Maria M. Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unsettling America written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-11-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Things My Mother Told Me written by Maria M. Gillan and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 1999 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is luminous, feisty, heart breaking, and fiercely honest, often all in the space of a single poem. Her voice has the vigour and industrial strength grit of Grace Paley's, and there is genuine wisdom here, an intelligence born of direct experience. These poems are a breath of fresh air in contrast to the fetid self obsession of so much contemporary verse... a real pleasure...a must read for anyone who has ever experienced the deep joys, agonies, and mysteries of the mother, daughter bond.
Download or read book What We Pass on written by Maria M. Gillan and published by Guernica Editions Incorporated. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Identity Lessons written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In stories and poems that explore how our society shapes us, Identity Lessons features a wide array of ethnic perspectives on growing up in America. Leading the reader into the living-rooms, boardrooms, classrooms, and movie houses of America, distinguished writers from all points of the American ethnic landscape shed light on the space between conformity and difference, and examine the struggle between the need to belong and the pull of one's cultural roots. With insight, wit, and poignancy, the contributors to this anthology recall their attempts to reconcile family from the old country with the powerful messages about race, gender and class confronting them in their new surroundings. A collection of superb and moving writing, Identity Lessons deconstructs conceptions of personal and national identity, and forms an indispensable primer for understanding our cultural selves.
Download or read book The Place I Call Home written by Maria M. Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 when we recall the protection we felt within the warm sanctuary of family. These poems are beautiful crystalline narratives, sometimes exuberant and sometimes poignant, but always unflinchingly true. "THE PLACE I CALL HOME by Maria Mazziotti Gillan contains some of the most honest poems about marriage and family a reader is likely ever to come across. The craft is there, the well chosen word or phrase, but the power of these poems comes also from the truth in them that is moving and rare."--Marge Piercy
Download or read book Italian Women in Black Dresses written by Maria M. Gillan and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 2002 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Growing Up Ethnic in America written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories navigating the commplicated terrain of race in America, from acclaimed writers like Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Sandra Cisneros, Sherman Alexie, and Amy Tan The editors who brought us Unsettling America and Identity Lessons have compiled a short-story anthology that focuses on themes of racial and ethnic assimilation. With humor, passion, and grace, the contributors lay bare poignant attempts at conformity and the alienation sometimes experienced by ethnic Americans. But they also tell of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities, and the realization that it was often their difference from the norm that helped them to succeed. In pieces suggesting that American identity is far from settled, these writers illustrate the diversity that is the source of both the nation's great discord and infinite promise. "These beautiful stories radiate with the poignant, ingenious ways young people come to terms with their ethnic identities, negotiating their families, school, friends and their futures . . . This exemplary collection fulfills the editors' aims: to open dialogue and encourage the telling of difficult, adaptive or affirming life experiences." -Publisher's Weekly
Download or read book My Tarantella written by Jennifer Martelli and published by VIA Folios. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not being a man, I bleed like this. -Bhanu Kapil, "What is the shape of your body?"
Download or read book Italian American Writers on New Jersey written by Jennifer Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 helps them to succeed. Although presented from the vantage point of only one ethnic group, this book addresses in microcosm the complexities of American identity, depicting situations and conveying emotions that will resonate with people of all immigrant ancestries. Among the many writers featured are Gay Talese, Bill Ervolino, Tom Perrotta, Louise DeSalvo, Carole Mazo, Diane di Prima, and Maria Laurino. Each of the contributors provides a fresh perspective on the diversity, complexity, and richness of the Italian American experience. Publication of this book is made possible in part by a grant from the Institute of Italian and Italian American Heritage Studies, State of New Jersey.
Download or read book Italian Immigrant Radical Culture written by Marcella Bencivenni and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture compellingly documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture.
Download or read book Paterson Light and Shadow written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paterson Light and Shadow tells the stories in poetry and photography of Paterson, New Jersey, from one of the most gifted poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and fine art photographer Mark Hillringhouse, who together have spent a lifetime living, growing up and working in and around one of America's most important historic industrial cities. In her signature style, Gillan combines sublime moments with gritty detail when she writes about growing up as a working class Italian immigrant as in the lines from the poem In the Still Photograph, Paterson, New Jersey, Circa 1950 "The rough feel of a washcloth / and Lifebuoy soap against my face, / the stiff, starched feel of my blouse, / the streets of Paterson, old and cracked, / the houses leaning together / like crooked teeth..." Hillringhouse's award-winning black and white Paterson photographs accompany each poem and resonate with the mood and feeling of Gillan's writing in crushed velvety blacks and grayscale tones that evoke the moods of this city's past and its urban decay. This collection contains over thirty poems and thirty photographs that together explore the hallowed precincts of this once great industrial city, envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as the birthplace of manufacturing in a new nation, a city now home to countless immigrants who still struggle to work and to build lives and survive.
Download or read book Strut written by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie and published by Agape Editions. This book was released on 2018-03 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These poems are just as much about injustice, struggle, and survival as they are about transcendence and love. Strut is a celebration of self-acceptance, ancestry, love, sensuality, and resilience. It's not a book of answers, but a blessed, influenced weaving together of shadow and light.
Download or read book What Blooms in Winter written by Maria M. Gillan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. In WHAT BLOOMS IN WINTER, Maria Mazziotti Gillan finds cause to celebrate the clarity and comfort of people and times past. This book is a praise song for all that is human and that survives despite grief and loss. It is one woman's story of an immigrant girl growing up in the 1950s in Paterson, NJ, and seeing over a distance of so many years all that she was given to carry into her life as a woman—wife, mother, daughter, grandmother, widow, and arts and eco-activist. All these experiences and people have formed her into the indomitable woman she is. Laced with humor and optimism, this book leads us to believe that flowers that bloom in winter out of hard ground have their own audacious beauty.
Download or read book Maria Mazziotti Gillan Greatest Hits written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and published by Pudding House Publications. This book was released on 2003-04 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Where I Come from written by Maria M. Gillan and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 1995 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great selection from a fine New Jersey poet.
Download or read book All that Lies Between Us written by Maria M. Gillan and published by Essential Poets (Ecco). This book was released on 2007 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
