In Maria Giura’s If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she’s made of her childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost loves and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents’ Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them "still fighting, still making us, still together", then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to "spread out their blankets and live." Moving between New York and Italy, between family and “stranger,” these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father "waiting for her on the corner… bread in his hand" to the sister who "pulled the music out of her, helped her make her own song." Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.
Advance Praise
The best poetry takes you back to the things you know. In this collection, Giura takes us on a tour of an American landscape while showing us how much we have in common—you’ll find people you recognize and glimpses of yourself. You’ll hear Mario Lanza…singing in the stereo and smell Joy in a kitchen on 84th Street. Through these finely crafted poems, Giura reminds us of what is good and what it means to endure what isn’t, and she does so with a universality that invites the reader in and with a voice that is to be trusted and admired. Kevin Carey, Junior Miles and The Junkman, Set in Stone and Jesus Was a Homeboy
In this collection, Giura skillfully weaves between the particular place and time of her youth to present day, eventually making her way back to her parents’ ancestral villages in Italy. From a Sunday meal that becomes a holy experience to Aunt Rose combing the ocean out of [her] hair, Giura’s poems are empathetic, evocatively drawn portraits. A wise and captivating collection. Jennifer Romanello, contributor And There Were Red Geraniums Everywhere: Women's voices of the Italian diaspora in North America
If I had to use only one word to describe this collection, it would be grace. It’s grace that allows Giura to write the past with wisdom, forgiveness, and playfulness, masterfully leading us through the front door of her childhood home, into the bakery where her parents toiled and out the back door to love and heartbreak, connection and healing. Sharp and delicate like her mother’s good crystal… filled with burgundy wine, these poems will stay with you long after the last sip. Julia Paul, Table With Burning Candle, Staring Down the Tracks and Shook
