Sicilianas

WINNER OF THE 2022 LAURIA/FRASCA POETRY PRIZE



Sicilianas, an admirable work of imagination, creates a space where we-like the characters in its poems-live uneasily. It's a space of myth and nightmare, where ghosts are more vivid than the living, the dreamed more important than the lived. Over and over, in these evocations of twentieth-century Sicilian immigrants and their descendants, facts yield to emotional truths. Women dominate these stories: their bravery, their fears, their transcendence, their legacy. The astute mingles with the sensory, the complex thought with the heartrending cry. Manizza Roszak has an exquisite lyricism, an ear for the music and tension of the line, which gives her poems the power to render "the lives / of the loved played over / for us as they might / have been."

-Kathleen Ossip, distinguished judge