Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced "A Family Lexicon," her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." "A Family Lexicon" re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of a family enduring some of the most difficult years of the twentieth century, the period from the rise of Mussolini through World War II (Ginzburg's first husband, who was a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis) and its immediate aftermath. Every family has its store of phrases and sayings by which it maintains its sense of what it means to be a family. Such sayings and stories lie at the heart of a great novel about family and history.

The poems in Peg Boyers's Hard Bread are "spoken" in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life - her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese - much is invented. The result is a book by turns melancholy and acerbic, mournful and satiric, contemplative and combative.

"Pieta
"
This time the migraine came with a vision
bathed in night sweat: your man's body on my lap, legs
and arms white as casein draped over
mine, spilling onto the cassock, new sores
on your legs, dried blood
on your feet and hands,
from your chalk mouth
the words "forgive me,
"from mine, the impossible
"no
"
"Hard Bread,"" "Peg Boyers's debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and its brilliant lyricism. In "Honey with Tobacco," Boyers's own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet's Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son, a postmodern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. In familiar tableaux drawn from the Bible that have inspired great works of art--the Annunciation, the Pieta, and Judgment Day--Boyers explores what it means in contemporary America to be "blessed among women" and whether and how art can contain grief. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers' determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.
Praise for "Hard Bread":
"A great achievement of poetic voice . . . . It's absolutely clear what these poems are 'about, 'and they are unapologetic in their devotion to subject, clarity, precision, and accessibility."--Steven Cramer, "Poetry"

Rialto Invisible in this cheap night scene of the familiar bridge the lives - the lies - we lived on both sides of the canal, invisible the water's stench at low tide, the rotting debris beneath the picture-perfect surface, invisible the adjacent market still smelling of fish and ammonia, its slime of scales adorning the ground, invisible, too, in this souvenir print, the inevitable rat crouched under the pilaster, his throat quivering benignly in the moonlight, the silvery glow a local specialty: filth disguised as ornament. To Forget Venice is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyers's newest collection of poems. The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more frequently than any other, the city of Venice is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this varied and unconventionally polyphonic work. The voices we hear in these poems belong not only to characters like the mother of Tadzio (think Death in Venice), or the companion of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife, Effie, but also to wall moss, and sand, and - most especially - an authorial speaker who in 1965, at age thirteen, landed in Venice and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there. Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the author's desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.