Description
Gina Ferrara’s collection AMISS might be subtitled, “American Femicide”: these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union.
“Gina Ferrara’s collection AMISS might be subtitled, ‘American Femicide’: these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union, and our North American landscape (beautifully evoked), seems involved in their fates. Notice, for instance, how often the vaunted freedom of the road turns out to be something else for these passengers: women ‘driven in the direction / of what always goes wrong.’ Notice, also, the details, as Ferrara chooses her images with the fierce attention of an angelic detective—a bright blue van, a bible, a deck of cards spilled from an abandoned purse—so that an earned and grounded empathy propels the clear voice, along with the desire for justice. In these quick and vivid poems Ferrara makes of grief an illuminating fire, from which the poet speaks of and to the missing and dead women with exemplary, tenderly respectful, imagination, memory, and knowledge. I have so much admiration for this poet’s courage—Ferrara has gone among the ghosts and faced the terror every woman in our violent homeland spends a significant portion of her life trying not to think about…” —Laura Mullen
“Gina Ferrara writes with an uncanny attention to color and light, evoking depths of emotion from minute sensory details. This, her signature technique, is employed with chilling effectiveness in this collection of elegies to 52 murdered women, one for each of our United States, plus two more, as if the grief expressed here would overflow any national or political container. And yet it is a sobering chronicle of a distinctly American epidemic of violence against women. This is a stunning book, reverent, powerful, immensely sad.” —Bill Lavender
Poetry. Women’s Studies.
Author Bio
Gina Ferrara lives and writes in New Orleans. Her poetry collections include Ethereal Avalanche (Trembling Pillow Press, 2009), Amber Porch Light (Word Tech 2013), Fitting the Sixth Finger: Poems Inspired by the Paintings of Marc Chagall (Kelsay Books 2017) and WEIGHT OF THE RIPENED (Dos Madres Press, 2020), a finalist for the Eyelands Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Poetry Ireland Review and Tar River Poetry and was selected for publication in the Sixty-Four Best Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press. Since 2007, she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans. She is an Elizabeth George fellow who teaches English and writing at Delgado Community College and is the editor of the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press.
Author City: NEW ORLEANS, LA USA