What My Father Taught Me
In 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 sensual and spiritual. 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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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
These memory poems by Maria Giura are so rich in place and peopled with such vivid lives that one has the double pleasure of reading a book of poems and a "vita." She is a rare poet who can handle the deepest matters of spirituality and the perfectly rendered details of everyday life in the same poem. Like her father making the most difficult of pastries, a sfogiatelle, Giura makes her reader feel as if these poems took a lifetime to write, but are as delicate and graceful as a dab of sunlight.
--Joe Weil, What Remains, The Plumber's Apprentice, The Great Grandmother Light, New and Selected Poems, and A Night in Duluth
In this collection, Maria Giura offers us a slice of life seasoned with the reality of family bonds and her search for wholeness. Readers will be grateful for having had the chance to "hear" Maria, to enjoy the beautiful precision of language and emotion that she has set forth in these pages.
--Father Carl J. Arico, A Taste of Silence: Centering Prayer and the Contemplative Journey and Co-founder of Contemplative Outreach
