I WON’T BE/LONG HERE

My memoir poetry collection, I Won’t Be/long Here, has been released by Kelsay Books and I am thrilled to share it with you.

You can order the book here.

This collection is the culmination of many years of writing about family, food and geography. It is a memoir of my experience growing up in Italy and immigrating to the United States as a teen. I trust that these poems will speak to your understanding of your own roots and family dynamics.

Here is one of the poems from the collection.

BREAD GHAZAL

My father taught me that fenugreek, caraway

and fennel are the secrets to our rye bread.

Hard enough to crack under a fist,

we call it by its German name: schuettelbrot.

Every fall, we stocked Nonna’s cellar

with newspaper-wrapped stacks of this hard tack bread.

After moving to the States, I spent a year researching

the Roma, who carried spices in their caravans for bread.

They brought fenugreek, caraway and fennel

from North Asia, wouldn’t let those seeds drop

until they reached a safe place to bake their moro.

The Alps became this haven, and rye sourdough

has been handed down ever since, bubbling

into the staple with which we were bred.

When I go home to Italy, grains are not the villains

they have become for America’s

health-obsessed disdainers of bread.

Instead, they are revered as keepers

at the chapel door of seasons: there is strength

to persevere if one at least has bread.

Fenugreek cleanses the fluid body,

caraway disinfects, and fennel helps digest

what may be too dense about Lisa’s pane.

PRAISE FOR I WON’T BE/LONG HERE:

With the title of her debut poetry chapbook, I Won’t Be/long Here, poet Lisa Masé lets readers know from the start that she views language, like life, as changeable, and that just as parts of a word can be brought together or divided, so too can members of a family, different cultures, generations across time, ingredients in a simple recipe, to result in new meanings. These themes and more thread through the poems in I Won’t Be/long Here, and as they do, Masé invites the reader to see things differently, from her own multi-faceted perspective across time as child, immigrant, daughter, sister, mother, and multilingual Italian-American woman now conjuring poems, allowing us to discover pieces of ourselves, to recognize how any given circumstance of life, like a word, may impart a feeling of being whole (having a sense of belonging), altered (be/long), or in transition (I won’t be long here).

With lines like “I am making a reduction of my life so I might understand yours” and “When you show me this wine in your kitchen, I remember the flavor of apples / picked that morning, the melt of spring butter over latticed crust / and a grandmother who splashed wine into our water to make us stronger,” Lisa Masé shows that her sense of understanding and writing do belong here, in poetry, for a good long while.

—Mary Elder Jacobsen, poet and editor

Lisa takes us on a journey to the beloved country of her birth in the ancestral Dolomites, braiding sweet and sour tales of her love of the land, traditions and rituals that formed her core values. Her rich heritage of recipes and language illuminate each story using flavorful words from her two worlds. Being uprooted from her original home, she was faced with a challenging childhood. Yet, through it all, she held on to the rich traditions, “singing a song echoed from the mountains” that witnessed her birth and filled her bones to navigate a truly inspirational life. 

—Jesse LoVasco, author of the book of poetry, Native by Homebound Publications.

With the title of her debut poetry chapbook, I Won’t Be/long Here , the poet author lets readers know from the start that she views language, like life, as changeable, and that just as parts of a word can be brought together or divided, so too can members of a family, different cultures, generations across time, ingredients in a simple recipe, to result in new meanings. These themes and more thread through the poems in I Won’t Be/long Here , and as they do, Masé invites the reader to see things differently, from her own multi-faceted perspective across time as child, immigrant, daughter, sister, mother, and multilingual Italian-American woman now conjuring poems, allowing us to discover pieces of ourselves, to recognize how any given circumstance of life, like a word, may impart a feeling of being whole (having a sense of belonging ), altered (be/long ), or in transition (I won’t be long here).
 
With lines like “I am making a reduction of my life so I might understand yours” and “When you show me this wine in your kitchen, I remember the flavor of apples / picked that morning, the melt of spring butter over latticed crust / and a grandmother who splashed wine into our water to make us stronger,” the author shows that her sense of understanding and writing do belong here, in poetry, for a good long while.
 
We are taken on a journey to the beloved country of her birth in the ancestral Dolomites, braiding sweet and sour tales of the author’s love of the land, traditions and rituals that formed her core values. Her rich heritage of recipes and language illuminate each story using flavorful words from her two worlds. Being uprooted from her original home, she was faced with a challenging childhood. Yet, through it all, she held on to the rich traditions, “singing a song echoed from the mountains” that witnessed her birth and filled her bones to navigate a truly inspirational life.

—Jacquie C, podcast host, Mystic Living Today