Via Incanto: Poems from the Darkroom (Via Folios)

Poetry. “In poems of remarkable fortitude and clarity, Marisa Frasca, a self-described “hyphenated woman,” navigates the passages, geographical and psychological, that allow her uneasy flow between Sicily and America, among all ‘our known / and unknown mothers.’ This journey in which the Atlantic transforms into ‘the old dark and narrow hallway of the immigrant’ is always less familiar than we might anticipate as these poems conflate past and present, ‘the displaced, the incomplete, / the made new / superimposed and piled together in chorus.’ Like Nino Rota, Frasca conveys depths of sorrow and wonder in her rich, musical phrasings. The poems of VIA INCANTO are operatic with breath and sex and thirst and love.”—Michael Waters

“Frasca’s vision and passion are so arrived, so rich with variation, that they elevate us inside a lyric adventure. Vittorini’s ‘twice real’ reveries and Pavese’s story-poem architectures whisper like companions to Frasca’s native and chosen places: Sicily, the Atlantic, her beloved Manhattan—all fueling the book’s narrative aesthetic and elegant shapes. But her darkroom—part time-capsule, part temple—steals everything. It tests the heart with fire and compression, and it tests all of us with razor-sharp memory. Then it gives back a shining array of immortal human faces and stories, indelibly. VIA INCANTO is a luminous original.”—Judith Vollmer