What She Made of It. Cet article n’est pas disponible.What She Made of It

What She Made of It is Gail DiMaggio’s second full-length book of poetry. Her first book, Woman Prime, was selected by Jericho Brown for the 2018 Permafrost Poetry Prize and published by Alaska University Press. Her work has appeared recently in The Ekphrastic Review, The Whiskey Island, and Raw Arts Review where her poem “We Look into Fire” was a runner up for the Mirabai Prize. In 2022, five of her poems received that year's Passager Poetry Prize. She resides in Concord, NH.

Advance Praise:
In What She Made of It, Gail Dimaggio reveals the speaker’s deep introspection into the key relationships and experiences of her life. In this luminous collection, DiMaggio weaves ekphrasis, memoir, myth and lyrical realism to create a tapestry of emotion which is fierce, angry and punctuated by joy. Moments of intensity are leavened throughout by poems written in the Buddhist practice of “Metta,” expressing benevolence and kindness for various people and wishing them well. To experience DiMaggio’s keen eye and the beauty of her language is to fully appreciate a feminist poet’s quintessential journey to wisdom. In the final poem, the speaker sees herself as one of four runners in a Nancy Spero print and realizes she is both her younger self and her older self, but opens the possibility she “Could be a witch./Might be a vulture. She leads/ the runners into whiteout, into fierce joy./Even here, even now,/near the closing.“
— Kay Morgan, author of Girl, Woman, Bird (Finishing Line Press)

Gail DiMaggio's uncompromising and moving collection considers, unblinkingly, how we wear suffering: we bodies, we selves, the world. And she has a rugged empathy for body, for world, for all of us, and herself. She turns her passionate attention yet dispassionate eye to what the experience of life does to us: In the titular "What She Made of It," a response to a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth: the speaker refers to the way"... suffering/led her to elm// with its stink like cat piss,/with its twisted grain...." DiMaggio's empathy suffuses this collection with her unrelenting love for it all: the wayward souls who have crossed her path and the path itself, sometimes smooth, often stony, rutted, often beautiful. One feels she knows of hard roads: She gives us poems of her own tumbles down them. DiMaggio asks, parenthetically, "No single calamity inoculates us/against the next, does it?" But she knows, she already knows the answer to that one. This collection, vivid, visceral, will break your heart, and stitch it back together with threads of root and sinew.
— Marilyn McCabe, author of Being Many Seeds, Glass Factory, and Perpetual Motion