Wild Fennel. Poems And Other Stories,

Poetry. Italian Studies. "In poems born of the rocky soil of the old country, where children learn to sew in a 'walled-in-garden' with 'one potted plant–crown of thorns,' Frasca threads history and myth. She tells of immigrant hope that turns so quickly to devastating loss, and makes exile real–the self in search of the self. Writing to her counterpart, Anna, who dies young back in Sicily, and carrying her father's ghost, time feels endless, simultaneous. But Frasca is also a poet of wonder, and this work is alive, visionary, painterly. Here, myth isn't an old story, it is the art of transformation, and Frasca embodies an ever-present unfolding."–Anne Marie Macari

"Like mulberries that both stain and heal, these luscious poems and stories insist on our culpability in the misery of familiar or distant others while also consoling and nurturing with sensorial and sensual pleasures only a poet like Frasca, living within the tension between assimilation and alienation, between worlds that 'disorient & enlighte