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Marlene Dietrich’s Eyes is a collection of poems that speaks to a woman’s journey through time, history, and the self. These poems reflect luminous insights appearing on a dark horizon when hope and courage seem to dim. The poet’s voice finds its place in language that explores reflections that open any human heart to the possible, the redeemable, the precious. Writing is a ritual of self-definition, a visible striving to defy forces that would limit and define without the power of self- authorship. The poems are construed as rites that expand a feeling into a tangible medium that clarifies a deep preoccupation with the intentional power of the creative.
Isabella Colalillo Katz is a poet, writer/editor based in Toronto. She leads workshops and courses in personal creativity and creative writing. Isabella is the author of two previous books of poetry, Tasting Fire (Guernica, 1999) and And Light Remains (Guernica, 2006). Her creative work appears in numerous anthologies and journals.
For a woman to pick up a pen and write is a political act. Isabella Colalillo Katz takes it further into the language of poetry exploring the lives of women, the intellectual life and the human condition with curiosity, empathy and intelligence. Isabella writes “woman is mystery” and in the continuing struggle leads her to a passionate rendezvous with the gods and goddesses of ancestry.
~ Gianna Patriarca, author of Italian Women and Other Tragedies
Isabella Colalillo Katz’s poems are fearless. They are most successful, and perhaps happiest, when they travel deepest towards the parabolic, the metaphysical, to contemplate the mystery – the lingering hope of who we may be. This is a rare realm for meaning in contemporary feminist poetry. But there is much more here. Richly woven in this book of ancient as well as contemporary utterances is a peasant inner feminine intelligence that craves freedom. In this lineage of women oracles, of fertility rites that from time immemorial spell passionate joy as well as woe, Marlene Dietrich’s Eyes bewitch.
~ Antonino Mazza, poet and translator, editor of
Immigrant Songs: the poems, fiction and letters of Saro D’Agostino | |