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The Bread We Ate
Guernica Editions, Spring 2012
74 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550716047
ISBN10: 1550716042
English
$12.00 Canada, $12.00 US
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
In The Bread We Ate, Rina Ferrarelli continues the work begun in Dreamsearch (Malafemmina Press) and Home is a Foreign Country (Eadmer Press) of putting into words her own struggles with displacement and loss, with the language and culture -- misinterpretations and misidentification -- but also those of the people who came before. Drawing from the past and the present, she gives us vivid individual portraits set in a community of shared values and shared ideals, "matching new bricks with the old, /blending the colors to look good."
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.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
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."
Ellen McGrath Smith
Books by Rina Ferrarelli
