Persistence
All my writings tend to be about memory and loss, but also about sense of place and the strong link between the body and the physical (including landscape, trees, etc.) and (L)language. Every text alludes in some way to italianità ... whether by the use of an Italian word that just doesn't have an English equivalent, or by the infusion into the middle of a "lyric" poem on the ideas of Gramsci, Eco, or Pasolini, or by meandering musings on classical painting and landscape. Crossing the borders between different generic territories, each is to some extent a hybrid of poetry and essay.
Diderot Books, Mendocino, 1994.
* "Persistence (or Words & Things)" is a prose-poem dealing with memory and loss, the intensity of artifacts, and notions of time as cyclic; a meditation on the relationship of an involuntary immigrant with her home town in the Old World, on the geography and topography of memory, on the relentless but Imaginary passage of time, and on the signature of the past embedded in material artifacts.
* "Arcisate" is about my mother's (and my) birthplace in Italy and her death there. The piece was inspired partly by Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death. "Arcisate" is about my relation to that small town in the Italian Alps which I left as a child but have never entirely separated from. It is about how objects and places bear witness to meaning and re-inscribe the past in us.
* "My California" is an essay-memoir which blends detailed personal ruminations about 1960's counter-culture style with speculations on the politics of style and of global culture. It is a portrait of myself and/as my age‑cohort, merged with a cultural history of the early stages of the emergence of a society where Image and Style replace older ideological vehicles such as rhetorical forms or social institutions.
* Dream Machines includes "Underground", a short piece that invokes and re-writes a passage from an earlier text (in Half‑Life, The Present Press, 1990); "Apparatus", a poem-essay inspired by the film Cinema Paradiso; "Verona", is about my family and personal relation to that city, its history and artifacts.
* "An Alphabet of Everyday Life" -- a manic structuro-arbitrary enumeration of the post‑modern woman's "life of the mind".
Three other poems are included. The design of Persistence reflects the cross-breeding of academic and lyrical writing that seems to be my life-project: My "original" words horizontal, the quotations vertical ... together they weave the work's fabric. The green cover echoes the insistent theme of trees, whose image in some form is rooted on almost every page.