Fitting the Sixth Finger

In Fitting the Sixth Finger Gina Ferrara enters the poem with the same tenderness we come to see in the work of Marc Chagall. Each poem here is built on an armature of faith, each poem a belief in miracle and mystery, each poem a devotional of color and line and the naming of things we might have thought unnameable.

—Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate

Gina Ferrara is an extravagantly talented poet, and Fitting the Sixth Finger contains one gem of a line after another. The book is a feast of imagination and music. Colorful, smart, and subtle, with delight and surprise tucked into every niche and under each lovely petal, Ferrara’s wild and original bouquet offers a fitting tribute to the genius of Chagall.

—Annie Finch

Gina Ferrara’s readers know her work as much for its engagement in political anguish as for its homage to the natural wonders of the Deep South. But this time her “dexterous muse” has brought us an unexpected panoply of color and sound, a sheer celebration of Chagall’s genius that is finally the poet’s own love song. Like so many of Chagall’s mysterious paintings, the poems in Fitting the Sixth Finger oscillate indiscriminately between memory and dream, images observed and those only imagined, as they draw us close with their quiet color and vivid music. From an “improvised genesis, in short, effortless breaths,” each poem beckons and enchants, stealing details from Chagall or dowsing us with Ferrara’s own set of figures in poems that shimmer and shine, “glinting with the sheen of a wish. —John Gery