Italian Women in Black Dresses by Maria Mazziotti
Gillan, Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community
College in Paterson, New Jersey.
| Maria is also the author of seven other books of poetry, including Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica) |  |
| Where I Come From: New and Selected Poems (Guernica). |  |
She is also the editor of the Paterson Literary Review.
With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she edited Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, (Penguin); Identity Lessons (Penguin/Putnam); and Growing up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam).
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 the family revolves. The mother’s stories and words shape the lives of her daughter and granddaughter, but this book is about much moiré than ethnicity. Gillan succeeds in transcending any single identity category and explores instead the multiple ways in which each of us learns to identify him or herself.
The book is available directly from the publisher or from the University of Toronto Press distribution or from Independent Publishers Group in Chicago, Il. Ax 1-312-337-5985 or at sporty@ipgbook.com.