The devotion of saints in many Italian American households is as natural as breathing. One need not be particularly “religious” in the strict sense of the word. There is a mystical quality, especially among the women that I know and have known. In the following poems, I use poetic inquiry to show a vividness of experience that has an ineffable quality that would be more difficult to render in narrative and to “. . . use poetic representation as a means to evoke emotional response in readers and listeners in an effort to produce some shared experience between researcher, audience and participant.”
