Anna and Her Daughters by Marie Gray Wise

In Anna and Her Daughters, Marie Wise provides one “snapshot” after another of the wild, wily, gutsy, sometimes inscrutable women in her family album: the Italian great-grandmother Anna; the grandmother Maria still glittering in her coffin in her “turquoise sequined dress”; the difficult and sometimes complaining mother Julia with her blue eyes and “sharp sparkle”; and Marie Wise’s sister whose head Marie visits as if it were a 3-story apartment.  There Wise finds, in her sister’s keeping, the pearl necklace Wise wore when she “went to the prom with Jimmy Hernandez.” Nostalgic, funny, sad, exuberant, poignant, skillful and always honest, Wise gives us not only verbal photos, but the ebullient songs of her Italian ancestors. Her language washes over us—“the voices of [her] grandmother and her family—/their billows of un-sleek, second-hand Italian/their vowels puffing around the room.”

–Lois Marie Harrod, Spat and Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis

In Marie Wise’s linked poems, Anna’s daughter Maria is the matriarch of her Italian-American family, and a dynamo of energy and opinions. Probing her own relationship to Maria, Wise sees how her female relatives lived in a vibrant Italian-American mix of personalities, languages, everyday life and special occasions. The poems are written with honesty, humor, precision, sometimes a move towards the surreal: Maria “flew delicate dress hems through her machine/with the precision of a bombardier”; after a funeral, “the women gather plastic forks into cups/like bouquets from another planet.” Wise’s poems are big-hearted and clear-eyed, telling stories in women’s voices, family voices.

–Maxine Susman, author of My Mother’s Medicine

In this moving tribute to the family, Marie Wise explores the humor, love and heartache of three generations of Italian-American women.  From the narrator’s perspective as the youngest generation, Ms. Wise taps into a common struggle for the descendants of immigrants—how does one embrace a new culture and new opportunities without completely rejecting what came before?  And in this case, what came before is fromaggiacolloseooggi, Ms. Wise’s wonderfully inventive word describing her grandmother’s native Italian—crowds of vowels/that dance swiftly from their mouths/in words that seem to have no beginning or ending.  More than language and words, Ms. Wise is speaking of love—that deep, complex familial love which also has no beginning or ending as proven through the pages of this collection.

–Susan Gerardi Bello, author of Through the Oak Tree