Sogni d’oro by Elizabeth Alfonzo

Sogni d’oro is a stunning debut poetry collection — both a tribute to, and meditation on, family, aging, and loss. Alfonzo’s poetry has the ability to crystallize life’s harshest truths. Somehow both universal in nature and highly specific at the same time, this is a book for anyone who has loved deeply and been forced to say goodbye, anyone who has had to endure “the way death was coming / early, a question / without answer.”

–Tim Stobierski, Author of Dancehall

.

With clear-eyed, attentive poems, at once tender and skillfully restrained, Elizabeth Alfonzo’s moving debut chapbook, Sogni d’oro, is an elegiac meditation on the final days and eventual loss of two grandparents. “There may have been a way to escape death /,” she tells us, “but I didn’t know the route.” This is a poet with keen observation and poetic capabilities able to create beauty out of grief and art even out of a heart’s malfunction: “An electrical impulse burning / through its own sheath— // chordae tendinea plucked by a quartet, / quickening the rhythm of the SA node.” Sogni d’oro announces a strong new voice in poetry.

–Luisa Caycedo-Kimura, Author of All Were Limones