Things My Mother Told Me

Gillan is a true poet. These poems speak honestly and from the heart. Anyone interested in poetry with these qualities will be happy to add this book to his/her collection.

I love this book. It is honest, direct, moving, and explores the territory of the ordinary life of a woman in poems that lift off the page, they are so lyrical and brilliant. Maria Mazziotti Gillan leads us on a journey into her Italian-American working-class girlhood and explores the complexity of carrying that girl inside her for the rest of her life. This a book about relationships within a family, mothers, fathers, children,husband, friends, place --all are clearly delineated and evocatively expressed. Anyone interested in Italian American literature or working class literature or literature by women should read this book. It is wonderful. i keep it next to my bed to read it againa and again.

Things My Mother told Me reads like a novel, each poem a chapter of a remembered life, each memory informed by an earlier memory already translated into texture and language, into the images and sensations that combine to make Maria Mazziotti Gillan's work at once so familiar and yet so new, so distinct and evocative. I often felt submerged in the text, pulled along on the currents of story and song, full of longing for a geography of place both physical and emotional.These are poems full of grace and of the exquisite light of the river in paterson at dusk, where the poet's journey begins, and which has now reacheed the shores of all our lives.