Böcker av Maria Terrone

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Italian Studies. I love this collection of essays by Maria Terrone, an exceptionally talented woman of Italian American ancestry who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, with maternal roots firmly established, as she shows us, in Sicily's long history. Subtly crafted, witty, honest, it brings to life a New York one instantly recognizes. Her New York is an international city, ranging from the factories of Long Island City to a Fifth Avenue beauty company to shooting ranges to Catholic schools, a world where a woman might lose herself in preparing foods from many countries, to hunting down out-of-this world watches, gloves and shoes, while taking those graffiti-soaked subways to summer jobs in New York's cubicles and windowless offices. All of it memorably realized here on page after page in a language which only really fine poets can evoke, realizing for us, her lucky readers, a world shared in truth by so many of us.--Paul Mariani

Poetry. Italian American Studies. Women's Studies. "Maria Terrone's poems are simultaneously sensuous and spiritual, earthy and intellectual. Her imagination takes fire from contradiction and complexity. One small image--washing a potato or rearranging a lingerie drawer--can open up vistas of private desire or public history. Her poetry explores the contingencies of time and eternity, the mysterious interpenetration of reality and the imagination."--Dana Gioia "As alert to the edgy political nature of contemporary reality ('the names of nations changing/ as people revolt and take aim') as they are to the luminous energies of ordinary facts, or the hard truths of the body's own shocking vulnerability, or the complicated inheritance drawn from her beloved Italian ancestry, Maria Terrone's poems see 'eye to eye' with a world she can at once celebrate and grieve over, but for which she shows a deep, empathetic, richly articulate understanding. Thoughtful, grounded, even visionary at times, her language in this mature third collection is a kinetic mix of keen-eyed observation and unsentimental judgment. In one poem she sees 'gnarled hawthorn trees that lean/towards me like question marks.' As a poet she lives, like the rest of us, in a world of questions marks--but what shines through them is the fierce light of the life force itself, telling her 'it's possible for a body to float on joy.'"--Eamon Grennan "Maria Terrone's eyes and ears are honey, and her touch is 'near enough to lift each hair on my skin.' Through trauma and joy her nuanced and evocative poems are insistent and alive. Terrone pinpoints unforgettable moments and we can feel the shock of discovery as she enacts how 'to suspend your life for another.'"--Annie Marie Macari