Poem: Call the Dead

Some days only a phone call to the dead will do—like my father’s grandmother I met in stories delivered in the chiaroscuro of an aging aunt’s dusty salotto. When the embroidered curtain rose under the pressure of an indecisive July breeze, an old painted photograph fell into my hands.

I ask this ancestor about her mother, the nameless Maid, whether she’s spiteful or sorrowful. Does she feed the wire of grief that runs through my muscles and tendons, snakes around my spine, bathes the upper chamber of my heart?

Or does she get along just fine with the others in that haunted house I am dying to break into, search every room, scratch the paint off the walls, make all the ghosts come out. Talk to me.

Edvige Giunta

Edvige Giunta is a scholar, writer, and educator who carries Sicily with her wherever she goes, and lately that means the English Department at Kean University, where she is a Professor of English. Born and raised on the island, she studied at the University of Catania, then crossed an ocean to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Miami.

Her field is Italian American studies, and her calling is making sure the women of that story are heard. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and, in Italian, Dire l'indicibile, a study of memoir by Italian American women. She works in generous collaboration, interviewing writers and artists such as Nancy Savoca and Marisa Tomei and coediting six anthologies that range from food and culture in The Milk of Almonds to needlework in Embroidered Stories. Talking to the Girls, her collection on the Triangle Fire, won the 2023 Susan Koppelman Award and now lives in Italian as Le ragazze della Triangle.

Edvige also works as a literary resurrectionist, returning classics such as Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, Helen Barolini's Umbertina, and Louise DeSalvo's Vertigo to print with her own accompanying essays. Her creative writing appears in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Creative Nonfiction, and Words Without Borders, and in Italy in El Ghibli and DWF.

She leads memoir workshops for writers at every stage, carrying forward her long collaboration with the late Louise DeSalvo. She lives in New Jersey, where, rumor has it, the almonds are adequate.