The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. Coeditor Louise DeSalvo.
“Like those quintessentially Mediterranean nuts, the pieces in this impressive anthology are, with varying degrees, gentle and piercing. Some are best read alone over a cup of steaming cappuccino, while others pack more of a punch when read out loud with sisters or girlfriends. Editors DeSalvo (Vertigo) and Giunta (Writing with an Accent) have collected a vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories from more than 50 writers that defines today's female Italian-American experience.”
—Publishers Weekly
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Often sentimentalized as nurturing through food, Italian American women have struggled against this stereotype to speak of the realities of their lives. In this unique collection, they speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memory rooted in experiences of food, more than fifty writers dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir.
Though they begin with food, the writers in this collection quickly carry the reader into unexpected, sometimes shocking terrain as they bear witness to the historically unspeakable in the Italian American experience—mental illness, family violence, incest, drug addiction, AIDS, and environmental degradation. Tantalizing and appetizing, this collection is intellectually and politically provocative, for it revises any predictable notion of what it means to be an Italian American.