If We Still Lived Where I Was Born

In Maria Giura’s If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she’s made of her childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost loves and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents’ Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them still fighting, still making us, still together, then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to spread out their blankets and live. Moving between New York and Italy, between family and ＂stranger,＂ these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father waiting for her on the corner . . . bread in his hand to the sister who pulled the music out of her, helped her make her own song. Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.