The Legacy of the Sidelong Glance

The haunting prose poems of Michelle Reale's The Legacy of the Sidelong Glance form a rare and intimate portrait of a complex, resilient, and essentially powerful woman betrayed by the politics of family and culture. Burned free of sentimentality, this collection pushes against the mindless stereotypes that stunt the mainstream image of Italian American women, and instead offers a fresh, honest portrayal of a life forged by oppression and survival.

-Olivia Kate Cerrone, Italian-American novelist; recipient of Distinguished Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Michelle Reale does not write with a pen, but with a crochet needle. Her words create a quilt laced with blood. The past is haunting, but there is no shame in excavating it for us to behold. All that is Italian swells with retrograde taste and melodramatic feel. The cadavers of yesteryear rise as Lazarus while Reale skillfully and painfully unearths her heavy legacy. These poems shine as polished fossils.

-Alessandra Bava, author of Guerilla Blues, Edizioni Ensemble, 2012

Reale sweeps us up into the velocity of her headlong wind tunnel. In her prose poems we encounter striking images as truths spinning around us. We are taken in so close to the place where legacy and myth meet, but we never quite land. We breathe in her vortex. We lose sight of any sharp triangular edges, as the beginning and end points swirl away and we spiral among words.

-Sonia Elisabetta di Placido, author of Exaltation in Cadmium Red, Guernica Editions