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In her first book, What My Father Taught Me, Maria Giura writes richly and candidly about growing up Italian-American Catholic from her earliest days as the daughter of immigrant parents and a workaholic father to her coming of age and onward into adulthood where she works at reconciling the natural and divine. Her poems are a celebration in the face of love and loss. They are at once intimate and universal, serious and light, and are grounded in the Brooklyn, New York that she cherished and called home: from her parents’ pastry shoppe, to the view from the Belt Parkway, to the family living room “where [she] learned to pull out the microphone, even though it was always broken, and sing.”
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What My Father Taught Me can be Purchased at I AM Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Asterism and is Reviewed/Featured in the Paterson Literary Review and SI Live.
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Maria Giura's What My Father Taught Me is brave, tender, and full of passion--a book any reader will want to keep on a bedside table to read over and over. Giura is a powerful poet simply because she keeps writing when she is most afraid and explores the issues of family, faith, and longing with an honesty and reverence that leave us in awe.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner A delicate yet steel-willed honesty propels these wonderful poems, the voice of a woman who has faced down her own doubts—the only doubts that matter—and found a hard won peace. Strange and wonderful in this corrupt, post-Truth era to read poems that are so true to a self’s need for and absolute belief in, God and sees with the clarity of a child now grown up, the knots of human experience that can, so easily, strangle us. Edward M. Hack |
Not since reading Maria Mazziotti Gillan have emotions leapt from the page and drawn me in. Giura has masterfully bared her soul. I picked up the book with the intention of reading several poems and could not put it down until the last page. You will weep, angst, and smile with the honest Giura, who as both a sensitive child and young woman, takes you on her journey of growing up with a father earnest in providing for his daughters and strong, courageous wife, yet affection-wise absent for them. The collection will fill you with admiration and empathy for these individuals with the best of intentions but miss-matched abilities and ambitions. Giura will place you in the neighborhood of her origin with precision and engage you in ever-changing dialogue with God, as you will walk in her shoes over and over again, because, like me, you will never read it just once.
Marisa Labozzetta, Thieves Never Steal in the Rain, Sometimes It Snows in America, At the Copa, Stay With Me Lella |
