The the Bread We Ate: (192 Essential Poets (Guernica))

In The Bread We Ate, Ferrarelli continues the work begun in Dreamsearch (malafemmina) and Home is a Foreign Country (Eadmer) of putting into words her own struggles with displacement and loss, with the language and culture - misinterpretations and misidentification - but also those of the people who came before. As the one educated in English, she took it upon herself to honor and remember the lives of those who had come before and who had paved the way with their hard work, to speak for those who could not speak for themselves. Drawing from the past and the present, she gives us vivid individual portraits set in a community of shared values and shared ideals, "matching new bricks with the old, /blending the colors to look good."

About the Author :
Rina Ferrarelli came from the region of Calabria, Italy, at the age of fifteen. She was awarded degrees in English from Mount Mercy College (now Carlow University) and Duquesne University, and taught English and translation studies at the University of Pittsburgh for many years. She has published a book and a chapbook of original poetry, Home Is a Foreign Country (Eadmer Press, 1996), and Dreamsearch (malafemmina press, 1992); and three books of translation, Light Without Motion (Owl Creek Press, 1989), I Saw the Muses (Guernica, 1997), and Winter Fragments: Selected Poems of Bartolo Cattafi, (Chelsea Editions, 2006).

Review :
In specific, textured poems, Rina Ferrarelli documents the life of a woman in the journey from Italy to America. These are powerful, emotional, well-crafted poems that explore the conflicts of departure and return, the pleasure and heartache of journey and family. This is a book not to be missed. - Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Winner Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, 2011) The Bread We Ate revels in textile-crafting, carpentry, stone-masonry, and mining not so much to transform the work of her Italian ancestors into poetry, but, rather, to make this poetry - written in a language Ferrarelli herself had to enter carefully, cautiously as a young woman - into handiwork that is as individual as it is consciously communal. Like the carpenter she writes of in "The Apprentice," Ferrarelli is a master who joins her will, the vision of her inward eye, to language in order to make the past, once again, a living thing; and like the furniture that carpenter made, Ferrarelli's poems are "true / from the inside out." - Ellen McGrath Smith, (Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics)