REVIEWS

If We Still Lived Where I Was Born by Maria Giura. Bordighera Press, 2025. 114 pages, $18.00.

Reviewed by Vincent Sergiacomi

In If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the “where” Maria Giura so lushly describes is not just a place. Rather, it is the unique combination of place, of feeling, of the people who engender life into objects and scenes which would otherwise be nothing more than images. Giura writes in a personable, conversational tone, and is a master at knowing what to tell her reader and when. Though her stanzas are often short and her lines barely take up half the width of a printed page, every scene feels incredibly full, and dense. I’ve never encountered writing about family, which does such an effective job of filling the page in the way a family fills a room – the noise, the joy, the tangle of relationships shines through here in vibrant detail.

“Sunday” is one of my favorites from this collection, and perfectly showcases Giura’s talents. A mahogany table and the fine china rested upon it are personified and brought to life – “blooming with conversation and laughter” – as descriptions of food, music, and family complement and reinforce each other. The really impactful thing about this piece (and of this collection on the whole) is that these connections are not forced, nor are they accidental. Giura instead is distilling something which was there the whole time: This place she describes is all of these things combined. “If I close my eyes,” she writes, “I am there… can taste the love and song,/the thrill of being young.”

This complex understanding of place lends this collection its focus, and enhances the feelings Giura speaks of. There is a quiet tragedy behind much of this collection: By making us aware that place is created by temporary things, we are constantly reminded that we will never return to the places we were born. It is not physical distance creating this gap, but life itself – over time, places inevitably change.

That’s not to say this collection is as morbid as all that. Beyond the tragedy, there is also beauty through the poet’s deft appreciation of the moments she describes. “I believe”, she writes in “Still Matters”, “that even though he’s gone, everything he leaves behind still matters./I believe I will find it all when I need it most.” While places change, they also come with us, and this quiet reverence for the past speaks to the importance of memory. We will never make it back to the places we came from, but we will also never be fully gone from them. The people we love and grew up with, Giura implores, shape our current lives just as much as our current day-to-day. They did not die when they passed away; they come with us always, and bring the importance of the past with them.

Giura’s poems are nostalgic, lush, and approachable. Among poets, her aptitude for story-telling is evident and helps her craft poems which capture the complex and complicated emotions of remembrance. As a meditation on family and identity, you would be hard-pressed to find poems which hit the nail on the head better than If We Still Lived Where I Was Born. Absolutely recommend.

Bio:
Vincent Sergiacomi is a poet and writer. His poetry has appeared in publications including Poetry Pacific, the Eunoia Review, and the Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices anthology. His criticism has been featured in Ovunque Siamo and the Philly-based Loco Magazine. Vincent holds a degree in English from Arcadia University, and currently resides with his fiancee and their cat in West Philadelphia.

Colloquy on Mad Tom by Matthew Cariello. Bordighera Press, 2025. 90 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Vincent Sergiacomi

If you’ve ever loaded an old musket, or seen one loaded, you’d know it’s a multi-step process. First, the gunpowder is funneled in, down the barrel; then the ball itself is inserted the same way, with a ramrod nestling it in place. The gun is primed, aimed, then fired, then the process repeats again.

Matthew Cariello loads his words into stanzas as a redcoat would load bullets in his musket. By that, I mean his writing carries some physicality, some intent which indicates there is a process by which he came to use these words in particular. Half-hearted restraint is absent; there is instead the confidence of a seasoned veteran, funneling his powder and keeping his cool as the enemy’s charge falls upon him.

Maybe Colloquy on Mad Tom makes me think of muskets because it’s, at times, damn brutal. But through this brutality, it is also beautiful and evocative and elegant, even at the height of its forcefulness. In “The Lilac”, for instance, Cariello’s words give an emotional whiplash:

When my sister died, our mother cried Why

won’t God take me in her place?

I collected lilacs from the roadside, thick

with bees, and left them on the table –

There is mastery in the quick turn between these lines, the jutting from thought to thought. “The Lilac” is just one example of this collection’s meditations on processing death, but it typifies the essence of Cariello’s strength as a poet. Grief is expressed here much as it is felt in life: Sudden, torrential, and then distant again. The crying is replaced by the gentle scene of picking flowers, the profoundness we find in the mundane when it’s reflected against the blackness of tragedy.

This poem’s final lines, I think, sum up its poet’s thesis more than any others: “Don’t ask me what/spring means. I don’t know. The lilac blooms.” That is the idea at the heart of Mad Tom – we are not made to process grief, to truly process it. But we try, maybe because we need to or just because we have no other choice. To do so takes poise, and there is much of that here. The reflections in these poems are raw, and feel so alive. There is a masterful blending of calm, static images, and blasts of feeling.

Grief is not the only feeling here – indeed, Mad Tom at times feels just as much a celebration of life as it does a vigil of life’s end. “Sonnet on the Night John Lennon Dies” is manic and abuzz with feeling; “Solstice” is tempered and scenic with its contrast of family warmth and solitary come-down. Cariello makes lush images with his words, which I think is part of what makes every poem here feel so frankly alive and deeply personal. That life, after all, is what makes the grief sting.

Colloquy on Mad Tom is one of the best meditations on mourning I have come across in my time as a reader of poetry. The key reason, I think, is its delicate balancing of life’s vibrancy and death’s tragedy. This is a truly heavy collection of thoughts and feelings to get through, but it is evocative in a more complicated way than simply being mournful. Part of that is, again, the forceful beauty of Cariello’s writing. But another part of it is the self-awareness of each piece, the sensation that each of these ideas are connected. As individual poems, each piece is great; but as a cohesive collection, they complement and elevate each other.

The depth of feeling Cariello evokes is stunning, and for someone dealing with grief, I imagine its elegance and emotion would be cathartic. For anyone else, this is a must-read simply for how well written it is. I cannot recommend more.

Motherdevil by Kailey Tedesco. White Stag Publishing, 90 pages. 13.95

Reviewed by Jennifer Martelli

In her September 9, 2024, interview with Stephanie M. Wytovich, Kailey Tedesco talks of her “access point” to Motherdevil:

“I had wanted to write about the New Jersey Devil for years, but I had trouble finding my access point. . . . One day when I was a few poems in, it just clicked that I could write a book from the POV of the Jersey Devil’s mother, Mrs./Mother Leeds. . . . I had perinatal and severe postpartum anxiety/depression, so it wasn’t until my son was nearing a year old that I could commit myself fully to this vision . . . .”

In a collection both moving and sonically beautiful, Tedesco gives life to the mother of this New Jersey cryptid who haunts and stalks the Pine Barrens. Building character with voice and witchy language, Tedesco firmly places the reader in a place both visceral and emotional, giving the reader an access point to this unique—yet universal—mother. In “pinelands,” Tedesco write

it is here they will legend me with broomsticks

between my legs & legs & legs

always just beneath

your strip malls & sundry shops

their light is spoiling too

In this early poem, Kailey Tedesco alerts us to the voice and ubiquitous nature of Mrs. Leeds, with echoes of Sylvia Plath’s beats (“legs & legs & legs) and with contemporary imagery (“strip malls”) rooted in present-day New Jersey. If Mrs. Leeds gave birth to her thirteenth child in the 18^th century, she still walks the state. As Tedesco says in “confirmation,”

if i’m going to live in this little hell

make it my home

As I read this remarkable book based on a localized legend (those of us not from the area might know of the Pine Barrens from The Soprano’s episode), I thought of Dorothea Lasky’s essay in Lit Hub about horror in poetry. She writes, “And maybe a good horror story—a space where everything is terrible is simply acknowledged—is a human embrace after all.” For this reader, the embrace came in the form of Tedesco’s language. Her use of nouns as verbs had an intoxicating effect, one that opened me to this experience. If Mrs. Leeds—“vampire of the pines”—was a witch, her poetic words became spells. In “tokophobia,” Mrs. Leeds’ “body was once werewolved with lanugo.” In “somnambulant,” Tedesco writes

somethings are not meant

to be pacifiers—

they asphyxiate & Ophelia

our eyelids

The language, too, recalls Sylvia Plath’s rage and love, as in “the thirteenth child,”

free from my every horror / i birth an entire arcana

to become divined in orb & shell & mane & horn &

an endlessness so soft trees rod-iron from the group

to gate this sleeping demon

i never said let this one be a devil!

or at least that wasn’t all I said—

i wanted to be one too

Motherdevil embraces all the nuances of motherhood: its aching love, its body horror, its heaviness. In “permission,” Tedesco writes

so i must cage you

but while you live

you must escape me

Isn’t this motherhood? “My true intention was to create life out of fear . . . “ Kailey Tedesco states in the title poem, “motherdevil.” In this remarkable collection, Kailey Tedesco has discovered her “access point,” a door we can all enter into the Pine Barrens, where she has “. . . made the wings / that keep the woods beating.”