Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Essays on Her Works

The work of one of the leaders of the multicultural turn in North American poetry is examined in this literary critique. In these essays, Tony Vallone explicitly examines the Italian-Americanness of Maria Mazziotti Gillan's prosody and childhood, while Joe Weil attempts to place her work in relation to a number of schools of American poetics, political ideologies, and autobiography. Rachel Guido DeVries articulates the Italian-American feminist ingredients of Gillan's poems, and editor Sean Thomas Dougherty reads her work through contemporary theories of whiteness, class formation, and resistance. In a personal yet critical essay, daughter Jennifer Gillan exhumes the role of kin and kinship networks in her mother's poetry.