Amiss

Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, "American Femicide": these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union.

"Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, 'American Femicide': these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union, and our North American landscape (beautifully evoked), seems involved in their fates. Notice, for instance, how often the vaunted freedom of the road turns out to be something else for these passengers: women 'driven in the direction / of what always goes wrong.' Notice, also, the details, as Ferrara chooses her images with the fierce attention of an angelic detective--a bright blue van, a bible, a deck of cards spilled from an abandoned purse--so that an earned and grounded empathy propels the clear voice, along with the desire for justice. In these quick and vivid poems Ferrara makes of grief an illuminating fire, from which the poet speaks of and to the missing and dead women with exemplary, tenderly respectful, imagination, memory, and knowledge. I have so much admiration for this poet's courage--Ferrara has gone among the ghosts and faced the terror every woman in our violent homeland spends a significant portion of her life trying not to think about..." --Laura Mullen

"Gina Ferrara writes with an uncanny attention to color and light, evoking depths of emotion from minute sensory details. This, her signature technique, is employed with chilling effectiveness in this collection of elegies to 52 murdered women, one for each of our United States, plus two more, as if the grief expressed here would overflow any national or political container. And yet it is a sobering chronicle of a distinctly American epidemic of violence against women. This is a stunning book, reverent, powerful, immensely sad."--Bill Lavender

Poetry. Women's Studies.