Guernica Editions

The Bread We Ate revels in textile-crafting, carpentry, stone-masonry, and mining not so much to transform the work of her Italian ancestors into poetry, but, rather, to make this poetry "written in a language Ferrarelli herself had to enter carefully, cautiously as a young woman" into handiwork that is as individual as it is consciously communal. Like the carpenter she writes of in "The Apprentice," Ferrarelli is a master who joins her will, the vision of her inward eye, to language in order to make the past, once again, a living thing; and like the furniture that carpenter made, Ferrarelli's poems are "true / from the inside out."

In specific, textured poems, Rina Ferrarelli documents the life of a woman in the journey from Italy to America. These are powerful, emotional, well-crafted poems that explore the conflicts of departure and return, the pleasure and heartache of journey and family. This is a book not to be missed.