{"title":"Bordighera Poetry Prize","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"alchemy-of-grief-book-emily-ferrara-9781884419898","title":"The Alchemy of Grief","description":"This is excellently controlled craftsmanship, conveying deeply felt emotion.The grief of loss is sharply poignant and real, yet never maudlin or self-indulgent. The music of the lines is subtle and fine. The tension between the controlled craft and the poignancy of the theme makes the reader participate in the poems and feel with the poet, sharing the human despair and transcendent emotions that bring us through to survival. - Daniela Gioseffi 2006 Bordighera Prize contest judge In her exquisite first collection of poems, Emily Ferrara reveals the unexpected power of regeneration at the core of a grieving mother's heart. From the initial hot coals of loss to her final vision of God's force, these poems take us on a journey of transformation. Catalyzed by nature, faith, family and friendship, written in a voice that is stunning and direct, Ferrara weaves her magic with the language of poetry. These poems convince me, that in Ferrara's skilled hands, we truly have a poetry of healing. - Richard M. Berlin True to its title, The Alchemy of Grief is a book of mystical transformations. The leaden weight of unthinkable loss is transmuted into the precious quicksilver of remembrance and survival, while the plainsong of Anglo-Saxon is translated into operatic Italian. Emily Ferrara thus shows us all that it means to be a healer: giver of life, lover despite death, and speaker of the truth that between these we can measure only the slightest difference, which is infinite beauty. - Rafael Campo","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50393672220945,"sku":"CIN1884419895G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51057432559889,"sku":"NIN9781884419898","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52135227654417,"sku":"NLS9781884419898","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1884419895.jpg?v=1751249945"},{"product_id":"driving-west-on-the-pulaski-skyway-book-john-ortenzio-bargowski-9781599540481","title":"Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway","description":"Somehow John Ortenzio Bargowski has caught the quintessential soul of the Italian-American experience in a New Jersey we will recognize. Here are the subjects, familiar yet freshly observed: the central importance of the family and the household gods, the echoes of the old Catholic rituals, a couple's courage in dealing as they can with a daughter's loss, the hundred daily blessings, things we take for granted or never see, until tragedy brings home to us the rock-hard sacredness of what we have: the evening light, the wren's consoling song, the forlorn Schwinn bicycle in the driveway, the tumbler pigeons your father cared for, the desolation of the empty packing plant facing the Jersey meadowlands, the stark dignity of an ancient grandmother praying in Italian as the TV preacher seems to call to her, the white hair of your wife packing mud up around the roots of the cabbages as she has for decades. All this, and so much more, in lines which capture the New Jersey idiom as William Carlos Williams caught it, but softer this time round, with the winds of the Adriatic mingling with the colder North Atlantic.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038183162129,"sku":"NIN9781599540481","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52593305387281,"sku":"NLS9781599540481","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1599540487.jpg?v=1751310097"},{"product_id":"driving-west-on-the-pulaski-skyway-book-john-ortenzio-bargowski-9781599540498","title":"Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway","description":"Somehow John Ortenzio Bargowski has caught the quintessential soul of the Italian-American experience in a New Jersey we will recognize. Here are the subjects, familiar yet freshly observed: the central importance of the family and the household gods, the echoes of the old Catholic rituals, a couple's courage in dealing as they can with a daughter's loss, the hundred daily blessings, things we take for granted or never see, until tragedy brings home to us the rock-hard sacredness of what we have: the evening light, the wren's consoling song, the forlorn Schwinn bicycle in the driveway, the tumbler pigeons your father cared for, the desolation of the empty packing plant facing the Jersey meadowlands, the stark dignity of an ancient grandmother praying in Italian as the TV preacher seems to call to her, the white hair of your wife packing mud up around the roots of the cabbages as she has for decades. All this, and so much more, in lines which capture the New Jersey idiom as William Carlos Williams caught it, but softer this time round, with the winds of the Adriatic mingling with the colder North Atlantic.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51038860869905,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038863786257,"sku":"NIN9781599540498","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52657223303441,"sku":"NLS9781599540498","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1599540495.jpg?v=1751119295"},{"product_id":"parakeets-of-brooklyn-parrocchetti-di-brooklyn-book-gerry-lafemina-9781884419676","title":"The Parakeets of Brooklyn\/Parrocchetti Di Brooklyn","description":"Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the English into Italian by Elisa Biagini. Winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize. What draws me to Gerry LaFemina's poems is how much of the world they contain: Brooklyn streets, race-tracks, Vietnam, a boy's imagined transgressions, family dramas. What is compelling is the tension between the speaker's urge to understand and the mystery that resists explanation--the partial understandings, the misunderstandings of childhood. Public and private collide, intersect, as events and images become more difficult to reconcile, to describe. LaFemina's poems ripple with erotic desire, the budding sexuality of young boys, the lure of the nape hidden under a woman's hair, the interiority of the boy who'd slid into the sleeve of the dark suit left by his father. 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Like noticing the morning sun rising like the golden timepiece it is, where a fleeting moment, caught in all its  fine-cut crystal clarity, might be held and sipped like sparkling champagne. This is what Joanne Monte offers us, with such rare sensitivity: a flower of great beauty amid the noise and clangor and violence that too often is our daily portion of dirt to eat. How often we have cried out in silence for a language \/ we cannot speak, for the grace of a single moment, immortal, held still in one shot, one frame. And isn't that frame the very image at the heart of Being that we hope to see more clearly, the very thing that, for our own peace, we must salvage out of this rubble of life? William Carlos Williams found this in the world about him, and now another New Jersey poet has found it for us as well. Read her. No, better, meditate on what she has to tell us in such exquisite and tender language. 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She also writes a kind of sentence that switches mid-run like a train on its tracks, re-casting its syntax without so much as a how-do-you-do. Through the curtain of birds and insects, or the scrim made of the lives of unadorned citizens, she allows us to press so close to the unfamiliar without making it any less strange. This is a gifted poet's gifted first book.- Susan Wheeler Nothing ever travels more \/ than half-way away, are lines in Carolyn Guinzio's wonderful first book. The tug away and toward one's place is at the center of this volume, the musty nativity that one carries through life like a muse. The farther away you get from the old women ambling to mass \/ in babushkas and black wool coats, the more insistent they become. These poems are rooted in the ethereal grit of the actual but also reach astonishingly into that beauty Wallace Stevens called the real - a world made fresh by imagination: We are meant to see \/ into the water, \/ into the sky between leaves. \/ These were two of our many \/ blue things. Spiders \/ fatten, listening \/ with their feet.- Paul Hoover The career of sunlight is complex and astonishing. A finch on a thistle turns the dome \/ of its eye, as Guinzio observes and then, astonishingly, pursues through numberless refractions, unprecendented spectra. Seldom is the prism of straightforwardness so fine, so furthering as here. 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