Maria Giura followed her first collection of poems, What My Father Taught Me (Bordighera Press, 2018), with her memoir, Celibate (Apprentice House Press, 2019), which won an Independent Press Award. Her most recent volume of poems, If We Still Lived Where I was Born, (Bordighera Press, 2025), was the recipient of the 2026 Paterson Book Prize.
As the title of the new collection suggests, a bittersweet yearning for the past is the central and recurring theme that Giura beautifully explores throughout the book. From the start, the collection draws readers into memories, opening with a poem imbued with the complicated tenderness and joy of an Italian American immigrant family. The piece functions almost as an ode to familial love, vividly captured in lines such as the memory of “my mother [holding] me in [her] lap” and “my father smelling of almond paste and cigarettes.”
Giura’s language is deceptively simple, yet powerful, creating sharp, almost tangible mental pictures. For example, in the poem “Sunday” she writes,
Grandparents, aunts and uncles,
cousins, friends,
relatives from Italy and Argentina
crowding our dining room
with its glass ceiling and chandelier,
the bow-bay window that looked out
onto 12 Avenue
with its emerald squares of lawn.
The solid mahogany table,
with its trunk-like legs and two leaves,
blooming with conversation and laughter,
my mother’s sauce and fresh pasta
steaming from the bone china
and the good crystal from the breakfront
filled with burgundy wine.
The poet privileges the sense of sight, with many poems originating from specific visual triggers like family photographs or vivid memories. While this structural formula can occasionally feel repetitive, it nonetheless serves as an anchor for the thematic exploration of the past, as in the poem, “Six Years Apart.”
In the picture, my sister and me
on the mustard-colored couch.
I’m two, she’s eight. She in a
red, knee-length dress,
her hair in an adorable pixie,
and me in a blue and white dress,
my hair light brown curls,
the side of my hand in my mouth.
She has her arm around me,
and we’re sitting close, smiling,
unlike the picture from my baptism—
my godmother holding me
above the enormous marble font,
family encircling us,
little Julie, in her flair coat and bonnet,
with face that says,
Why did you have to come?
The collection is comprised of three sections, each marking a significant stage in the narrator’s life and emotional development. The first section is characterized by a deep yearning for a family dynamic that it is no longer there – a holding onto memories while acknowledging their imperfections. This section emphasizes the crucial importance and lingering presence of parental figures. The impact is captured five decades later, when the poet notes,
my mother frames this picture
puts it on her desk
even though she and my father
divorced so many years before,
married other people.
Despite the passage of time and rewritten lives, the past remains a pillar, a feeling crystallized in the lines,
I know it’s a moment
that’s locked forever,
but I want to climb inside
and turn the key.
The second section of the book offers a shift in focus. It begins with the poem “La Vita è Bella,” and much like the eponymous Roberto Benigni film, it ultimately emphasizes the enduring significance of small, momentary happiness – those quiet, fleeting instances that shape our lives. Giura illustrates this through the poem “Arizona,” where the simple routine of a shared morning becomes something extraordinary.
Each day, we woke,
sat in our beds
drinking coffee,
talking,
laughing,
staring at each other,
stunned by this state
neither of us had been to before.
The third and final section, which brings the collection to a close, marks a significant thematic turn. It opens with the narrator’s first memory of shame, a profound internal struggle expressed as a disconnect where “my inside didn’t match my outside.” Shame becomes the central motif, manifested in different contexts: the delusions of early love, complex relationships with sisters, and friendships that are no longer as strong as they once were.
This personal struggle with identity and expectation is further deepened by the narrator’s acute awareness of a motherhood she never knew, which adds another layer of unfulfilled expectation and self-reflection to the sense of discord. Looking back at her childhood, the poet recalls how she projected her first, innocent understanding of maternal love onto her favourite doll, “Battatina.”
Afterward, I held her
as if she came from me,
as if I’d given birth,
fed her with a bottle whose milk tipped inside.
This cherished toy allows her to practise a gentle, instinctual motherhood. Yet, the memory is subverted by her surroundings in the pastry shop the family ran. On one side was her mother immersed in exhausting work, and on the other, “on the wall above [her father and the men] / a calendar of topless women”– women objectified, as it were. The doll becomes a symbol of an unfulfilled expectation, a pure concept of womanhood that does not match the gritty reality.
Ultimately, Maria Giura’s If We Still Lived Where I Was Born is characterized by a complicated and grateful exploration of the past, serving as both a realistic and imaginary refuge for the reader. It offers a comforting space to reconnect with long-forgotten family memories, fostering a profound sense of gratitude for shared past experiences. This overarching theme is symbolized by the bridge on the book cover, which is not merely a signifier of Giura’s identity, but the connection between the past, present, and future.
The collection concludes by reminding us that we are all inextricably linked to our life experiences, a sentiment the poet herself articulates in the closing lines of the poem “Bridge,” “where origin, like beams, sustains the crossing.”
Maria Pia Spadafora, a native of Calabria, is a teacher, freelance translator, editor, and creative writer based in Milan. She has translated numerous short stories and poems from English into Italian by prominent Italian-Canadian authors such as Licia Canton, Delia De Santis, Darlene Madott, and Sonia Di Placido. She is the Italian translator of Darlene Madott’s Dying Times (2025), and she has edited in Spanish Laura Zamora’s El Relojero de Portales. Maria Pia sits on the editorial board of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers (AICW).
