Abstract
“Passeggiata” means “stroll” in Italian and this book takes us on a series of urgent walks and conversations. With characters from classical pastoral poems reborn as contemporary Sicilians and Bronxites, these poems depict love and war, lyric and loss, justice and anger. The otherworldly names hide and unveil, distance us and bring us close to essential questions.
Refracting the wisdom of the Bible, Theocritus, Virgil, Milton, W.E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich, among others, these poems confront contemporary social and political disasters.