WINNER OF THE 2018 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY TRANSLATIONIn this first US publication of celebrated Italian poet Bianca Tarozzi, narrative poems (presented bilingually in both English and the original Italian) carry us through the poet's childhood memories of World War II under Mussolini, harsh post-war conditions, and mid-century changes that transformed Italian life, specifically for women. A unique figure in contemporary Italian poetry, Tarozzi draws significant influence from acclaimed American poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill interweaving powerful subjects with humor and heart. After: you have packed the suitcase, shut off the gas, turned all the lights out, locked the window and the big outside door, when you lean against a wall, afraid of falling, and wait, expecting the vehicle, the means that will transport you far away, when the sky sails clear, blue, and annihilating above the overpass, and you have no past or future, in that empty moment poetry pitches its tent. Bianca Tarozzi was born in Bologna in 1941. Her father was a political prisoner under Mussolini, and then a Senator after the war. She received a degree from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and taught English and American Literature for many years at the University of Verona. The recipient of numerous literary honors, she has translated into Italian the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, A. E. Housman, Denise Levertov, and Louise Gluck. Also the author of many books of poetry, she began writing poems in 1947, and continues to this day. She currently splits her time between Venice and Milan, Italy.

In poems from as varied women poets as Jane Kenyon, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, food emerges as a re-occurring and central metaphor in the way women live, in the pulse of the everyday, and as a vehicle for the exotic. From coffee to caviar, from potatoes to dandelions-even in hunger and anorexia-the metaphors of food have worked like yeast in the imagination of these poets.Preface by Chef Charlotte Turgeon.Phyllis Stowell initiated the Saint Mary's College of California MFA program. She is a former Fellow of the Camargo Foundation and was a Dewitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. She was granted a Barbara Deming Money for Women Award and was a winner of the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Poetry Prize. Her publications include Assent to Solitude, Who Is Alice?, and Sequence and Consequence, an Alchemical Journal. She publishes poetry, criticism, and poetry reviews.Jeanne Foster is a Professor in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Saint Mary's College of California. Her critical book, A Music of Grace, explores the vision of the sacred in contemporary American poetry, and her poetry collection, A Blessing of Safe Travel, won the Quarterly Review of Literature Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Hudson Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and other journals.