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Book
Labyrinth
These poems consider everything from the most transformative moments of childhood to the intense hold that mythological and literary history have on the poetic imagination. They examine the enduring complexity of our relationship with nature and suggest that a deep engagement with the life of the senses and the force of memory can create a kind of contentment.
Author: Rita Signorelli-Pappas
Paperback : 78 pages
ISBN-10 : 1947175157
ISBN-13 : 978-1947175150
About the Author
Rita Signorelli-Pappas’ poems have been widely published in such journals as Poetry, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, The Women’s Review of Books, and Southern Poetry Review, and also in such online publications as Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her first poetry collection, Satyr’s Wife, was published in 2010 by Serving House Books. It was favorably reviewed in Italian Americana. Her fiction has appeared in Helicon Nine, Crosscurrents, Italian Americana, Farmer’s Market, and VIA. One of her short stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and another received the fiction award in Italian Americana.
Her other poetry activities include her having been a regular poetry reviewer for World Literature Today and having given a number of poetry readings at places like the (now defunct) Cornelia Street Café in New York City; Queensborough Community College in New York; Arcadia University, Valparaiso University; The Michigan City Public Library in Michigan City, Indiana; Barnes and Noble in Princeton, New Jersey; and The Writer’s Room in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She has also been a featured reader in the Poetry Night series at the Highland Park Public Library in New Jersey.
In Rita Signorelli-Pappas’s latest poems, a man walks the streets of a distant city with holy salt in his pocket; an observer of a waterfall frozen in place bequeaths a craving for touch; Orpheus walks a familiar yet freshly seen path; tulips lean out sinuously in open space; and, amidst lyrics of insight and lament flies “the circling bee of thought.”
These well-wrought poems come from an attentive traveler who knows darkness and yet perseveres towards light and song. Intimate with the difficult world, its ruptures and its raptures, her moving lyrics, in their negotiations with history, myth, and quotidian imagery, never lose their impulse to embrace.
—Michael Morse, author of Void and Compensation
A “weightless radiance,” ancient and lovely, air-lifts the poems through the maze that is experience in Rita Signorelli-Pappas’ Labyrinth. The poems are quietly gorgeous. She has fashioned a scrim of her own making, “a mesh of flickering light,” in sure-footed lyrical and often irrepressibly buoyant verse that seeks to be unusual. They appear orderly, but these poems are stealth objects, with verbs that snap and startle and metaphors that hurl you someplace else
—Diane Mehta, author of Forest with Castanets
"I admire [Serving House Books] for the quality work they’re putting out plus the notable writers they’re publishing."
Jack Smith, The Writer Magazine