Word Wounds And Water Flowers

“A vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories . . . that defines today’s female Italian-American experience” (Publishers Weekly). Often stereotyped as nurturing others through food, Italian-American women have often struggled against this simplistic image to express the realities of their lives. In this unique collection, over 50 Italian-American female writers speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memories rooted in experiences of food, they dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir. This collection also delves into unexpected, sometimes shocking terrain as these courageous authors bear witness to aspects of the Italian American experience that normally go unspoken—mental illness, family violence, incest, drug addiction, AIDS, and environmental degradation. As provocative as it is appetizing, “this collection of verse and prose pieces . . . reveals the evocative and provocative power of food as event and as symbol, as well as the diversity of these women’s lives and their ambivalence regarding the role of nurturer” (Library Journal).

This book constitutes a first look at the little-known phenomenon of the Italian/American short film. What becomes apparent is the conspicuous interest these members of the newer generation of Italian/American filmmakers exhibit vis-a-vis their ethnicity, be such films a fiction, a documentary, or a music video. Equally significant is the lens through which they see their Italian/American heritage. While the older generations concentrated more on the by now well-known thematics of immigration and organized crime, as well as the debunking thereof, these younger artists/performers of short films have added to the general theme of heritage, at various degrees, that of race, gender, and sexuality. Anthony Julian Tamburri is a professor of Italian at Florida Atlantic University, where he is also chair of the Department of Languages and Linguistics. He is the author of seven other books, including A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer and To Hyphenate or Not to Hypenate: The Italian/American Writer: Or, An Other American? and is editor or co-editor of twelve collections, including the best-selling anthology From the Margin (1991/2000) and Screening Ethnicity (2002). He is a co-founding editor of Voices in Italian Americana: A Literary and Cultural Review.

A collection of 27 original essays, some formal and some personal, document the history of Italian American culture for general readers and for teachers of multicultural studies. They investigate Italian-American identity and contributions to American culture through accounts of everyday life, fiction, films, poetry, music, customs, traditions, social mores, religion, and other features. Among the contributors are an anthropologist, a playwright, several poets and novelists, a singer, an opera critic, and several literary critics and cultural historians. The chronology begins of course with 1492; the lexicon does not indicate pronunciation. Double spaced. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Poetry. Gioseffi was awarded a 1990 American Book Award for her compendium of world literature, Women on War: International Voices, and a 1993 World Peace Award from the Ploughshares Fund for On Prejudice: A Global Perspective. WORD WOUNDS AND WATER FLOWERS, a previous book of poetry, is also available from SPD. Visionary and powerful. With tremednous vitality...Gioseffi is a gifted, graceful, and moving writer -- Galway Kinnell.