This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father s lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City s gay club scene of the 80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul."

Poetry. LGBT Studies. An urban songline of New York. From the author of the memoir L is for Lion, comes a panegyric of the geology of Manhattan. These poems glitter. Manhattan schist is rendered as a template for the skyline and characters of New York. Grit and stardust collide in this debut collection of poetry and song. The book begins with the bright reflective quality of Mica and ends with the gentrified vision of the city where "New York is nine millions doors, and you have not one key." In between are stories of urban icons: iceman, fish peddler, heart butcher, meter maid, San Gennaro, the magic of grandmothers' hands, the vision of the oldest living tree in the city, immigrants who fell out windows and died in explosions, Italian phrases that link the essence of the sun to a rose to a heart, crushed tomatoes, sunsets, supermarkets, the glory of hot tar, the lessons of marines and lesbians. You will learn history and geology, Italian American heroes, and spiritual imperatives, through the syllables of this one poet's soul.