GRANDPA'S WINE is written where people make a life among the ruins of a shattered world. Feelings and memories take the place of an old coherence, now lost and never to be replaced. Gil Fagiani’s poems inhabit this world’s poignancy, searching its sorrows with unimpeachable candor and a spare language that perfectly suits its straightforward tastes and its undervalued satisfactions.
—Bob Viscusi, author of Astoria: A Novel, and An Oration Upon the Most Recent Death of Christopher Columbus
Gil Fagiani’s poems celebrate the older generation of Italian immigrants as they collide with America, as they simultaneously hold to old ways and forge new identities. His lean lines describe without judgment, like my grandmother tasting her sister-in-law's rosemary tomato sauce every Sunday, “good, good, good enough,” she would purr. This collection hums with love, but it is a love born of mastery of the ingredients, and the application of great discipline and control.
—Angelo Verga, author of A Hurricane Is, and 33 New York City Poems
GRANDPA'S WINE
by Gil Fagiani
ISBN 978-0-9817678-2-6
Soft cover,Saddle stitched,17 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
Photo Credit: Maria Lisella
Gil Fagiani’s poetry collection, Rooks is set at Pennsylvania Military College in the 1960s (Rain Mountain Press, 2007); his chapbook, Crossing 116th Street: A Blanquito in El Barrio was published by Skidrow Penthouse in 2004. He has translated poetry written from Italian, Abruzzese dialect, and Spanish into English. He co-hosts the monthly literary reading of the Italian American Writers’ Association at the Cornelia Street Café, and is Associate Editor of Feile-Festa: A Literary Arts Journal. Fagiani is a social worker by profession, and directs a residential treatment program for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts in Downtown Brooklyn.
Listen to Gil Fagiani reading during National Poetry Month, April 2007,WNYC Newsroom, New York, NY
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