My Life as an Island by Travis Mossotti

 

My Life as an Island

6 x 9 • 33 pages

$7.95 paper • 978-0-91378-542-3

“Whether portraying the hardscrabble poor living along the Mississippi River or staring as Guillaume Apollinaire stared into Le Seine in Paris, Travis Mossotti evokes the ghosts of his own working-class family. His urgent meditations upon three generations of Italian-American men torn apart by economic hardship and death transport us, in achingly beautiful detail, to the Meramec River and Missouri hills of a bygone era. In My Life as an Island, Mossotti sings of St. Louis, of a heritage the poet equates with “‘the crumbled red brick façade / of burned-out warehouses on the edge / of a river that is more American / than I can stand.’”
—Marcus Cafagña, author of The Broken World and Roman Fever