One of the most honest and needed collections around. This anthology is wonderfully edited with a great selection of writers and work. It is very comprehensive and is loaded with truths America needs to hear. Hats go off to the editors !

UNSETTLING AMERICA does just that. It brings into question settled ideas of American-ness and what it means to be an American. In additon the organziation of the book is such that the authors appear to be having a conversation about various aspects of conneaction and lack of connection to their own roots and cultures and to America as amelting pot and an opportunity to reinvision the promise of America. The work is clear, powerful, moving, exciting. It works out very well in a classroom or discussion group as it is very thought provoking. Also it makes great bedside reading. I relaly love this booka nd have bought many copies to share with my friends.

Forget the status quo of the Norton anthologies and the self-importance of the Best of American Poetry series; this is THE anthology that belongs on everyone's shelves. The Gillan's have compiled and arranged an eclectic selection of work from a great combination of poets both well-known and should-be-better-known. Broken into five thematic "chapters," it is laid out like a narrative, with different poets effortlessly flowing into one another and can be read from cover to cover like your favorite historical novel.

A very powerful collection of work that tells the real story of what it means to be an American. As an educator, I have researched and read other collections that claim to be similar, even superior but there are no comparisons. GROWING UP ETHNIC IN AMERICA is by far superior in quality.

"Growing Up Ethnic in America" is an immensley important anthology of honest, emotionally-charged, compassionate prose by established and newly emerging writers of all backgrounds. It is a testament to the truly groundbreaking work that the Gillans have been doing in book after book. This dynamic cultural duo have managed to not only change the face of mainstream anthologies by challenging the same old dominance of the mostly white male contributor, but have managed to create teaching tools for teachers faced with educating students of diverse backgrounds. I don't know how many times a student has come to me testifying that something they read in "Growing Up Ethnic in America" speaks to their personal experience and has inspired them to write, think and feel deeply, not only about themselves, but of others as well. "Growing Up Ethnic in America" is a life-changing anthology of brave and honest testimony from those often pushed to the margins of our society. The Gillans have done a remarkable job in culling together all of these fascinating and incredible writers. This should be one ... anyone's book club; but especially for educators and readers who truly care about where we've been as a country, where we are, and where we are headed.

This is a very moving and fascinating collection of fiction and memoir that includes work by such writers as ELDoctorow and NashCandelaria and Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan. It opens up all sorts of avenues for discussion in a classroom or a reading group at a library. These editors have done an excellent job of assembling a group of stories that are clear, powerful, driect, moving, and help illuminate the experience of the outsider in American society. Really wonderful. their other anthologies are exceellent as well.

IDENTITY LESSONS was a great learning experience for me. Not only did I learn about my own heritage but about many others, what America is all about. This collection of work is honest and thoughtful. I have used it in the classrooms and students have raved about it. It's good to know learning can happen using beautifully creative work.

It is a crying shame that some so-called reviewers disguise their vitriolic, biased opinions as cogent reviews. Have they read the same book? At a time where there needs to be more understanding in a greatly divided world there is a need for anthologies such as "Identity Lessons". I think the Gillans should be highly commended for being some of the few literary editors with the guts and conscience enough to put anthologies together that truly reflect the great poetry and prose being produced by a myriad of artists, activists and thinkers alive in this country today. As an educator in the school system of New York City, I find that my young students have responded tremendously and enthusiastically to the varied voices presented in "Identity Lesson". It is an important text that speaks to what they are living, thinking and feeling NOW, today!!! Don't listen to the "player-hating" neighsayers who must have some sort of personal (or political) axe to grind against the Gillans, who are doing the much needed cultural work that is so lacking in our society today. Please keep up the good work!!! We educators desperately need more books like this to reach our students and excite them with language and ideas from every aspect of our varied humanity. "Identity Lessons" deserves twice the amount of stars alotted here in this review. BRAVO!!!!!

This anthology is a beautifully organized and orchestrated celebration and inquiry into how our identities are shaped and formed by teachers, parents,childhood experiences, and popular culture. The editors ahve chosen work that is so clear and moving that the book is didfficult to put down and no matter where I open it, I find something that moves me or makes me laugh. It has work in it by writers such as Tobias Wolff, Sharon Olds, GAry Soto, Philip Levine, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, and many other well-known and not-so-well-known writers, but what these writers have in common is their ability to show us some new aspect of our own humanity. This book would make a wonderful text in a writing class and would inspire people who are looking for material for their own writing. It is just fantastic!

Though this poetry is provincial in form and content, it has a heart and its content often transcends its craft. Still, its the sort of poetry that the average reader who is not in love with the craft and knowledgeable about it will enjoy. What it lacks in sophistication, it often makes up for in feeling and insight into the human family in its everyday life--especially the Italian American family of New Jersey. A pleasant and easy read, if not terribly original in style.

This is such a brilliant, risk-taking moving book, I can only recommend that you read it immediately.You won't be sorry.Here we have poems about growing up, incidents in high school and grammar school. the life of an ethnic Italian neighborhood policed by the old ladies in their black dresses. The book traces this woman's life through girlhood, the books she read like Nancy Drew and the stars she admired like Doris Day to a time when her husband of many years becomes critically ill with Parkinson's Disease. I don't know how anyone could put his down without wanting to return to it again and again. Beautiful!!!!
Also read Maria Mazziotti Gillan's other books. She is a poet who transforms the ordinary, sees below its surface, and allows us to see as well.

Gillan who fiercely took back her Italian name only when multiculturalism became fashionable, is bascially a sentamentalist. Her poetry does not rise to the truly poetic. She needs to go back to square one and study the really good Italian American poets like Felix Stefanile, Diane DiPrima, John Ciardi, Daniela Gioseffi, Donna Masini, Joseph Parisi, Dana Gioia, Maria Fama, so many others, who can write with more than old-fashioned violin strings. I had a real desire to like the book, but I was disappointed. These other authors are highly recommended reading, evenif this Italian American poet falls rather flat. There are really norisks here. The language is pedestrian. Nothing original. Que piccata! What a pity!

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of the most influential living Italian-American poets. She is also active in the field of multi-ethnic poetry, and is the editor of the prestigious "Paterson Literary Review." Her poetry has been compared to the poetry of the great William Carlos Williams, who came from the same area in New Jersey. And from William Carlos Williams (whom she loves), she has learned that great poetry comes from "the cup that runneth over", that is, from emotion, from intuition, and from the genuine wonder at the marvel of life. Hers is poetry that is deceptively simple and that is based on content, images, and recollections, rather than semantic funamnbolism. Her poetry also pivots around recollection, in that she follows Wordsworth's tenet that poetry is "life recollected in tranquility."

Although Mazziotti Gillan's poetry deals essentially with her experience as an Italian-American, it transcends her own ethnic origins to reach a reality that encompasses all shades and shapes of American faces and the many ways to be American.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the "Paterson Literary Review". With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed 1994 anthology "Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American", published by Penguin in 1999. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including "Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems" (Guernica), "The Weather of Old Seasons", Cross Cultural Communications), and "Winter Light", an American Literary Translator's Award winner. She has had several poems published in "The New York Times", "The Christian Science Monito"r, and "Poetry Ireland", as well as in numerous other journals. Awards for her work include the 1998 May Sarton Award, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Chester H. Jones Foundation Award. In addition, she was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition. She has appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Leonard Lopate's Books and Co., and Garrision Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Her poetry book, "Things My Mother Told Me", was published by Guernica in 1999. Currently, she is at work on a memoir entitled "My Mother's Stoop."

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's poetry is bold and gutsy, and deals directly and unflinchingly with the complicated terrain of race and ethnicity in the United States. It also boldly deals with feeling, family, and expectations, with love and longing, with childhood and old age. Mazziotti Gillan is a courageous, risk-taking poet, who does not hesitate to bare her soul. She reveals the most intimate details of her life, her family relations, her experiences as a child, as a lover, as a wife, as a mother. These experiences, far from being only Italian-American, belong to the universal realm and reflect the destiny of "Every Woman".

I have personally seen and heard Maria recite her poetry at many of her well-attended poetry readings. Having broken, a long time ago, her silence, Mazziotti Gillan speaks, in her poetry as well as in person, with an assertive, inspiring voice that at times takes on prophetic, ieratic tones. She is not, however, devoid of humor.

Maria Mazziotti's poetry, in simple and direct language, explores the universal experiences of all humans, from childhood, to adulthood, to old age. Some of the poet's strongest poems, in this good-looking book by Guernica Press, reveal her own poetic itinerary in the world of men and in the magic Kingdom of Words.

This is a book I highly recommend-a fresh, moving, inspiring book.

A Reader in California

The poet's mother is the unifying spirit in this collection of heartfelt poems ablout family life. The mother is the vehicle through which Gillan's Italian ancestory comes alive and by which hope against all odds is maintained. Through these poems we come to understand how a family--any family-survives the hardships of the present through its links with the past and dreams for a future. The poems in this collection are written in everyday language aout everyday experiences. They speak in clear, cirect language about what it means to be human. They also remind us of the importance of place in shaping our lives. This book is a gem, and I think it would appeal to a wide cross-section of people. It will make you laugh and cry. I loved it.

I expected to find some wisdom presented in a poetic way, but the poems were drab and sounded like prose. There is nothing new here and the poet seems uninspired and provencial. I was looking for good Italian American poetry, but this isn't it. I've read DiPrima, Barolini's book, Gioseffi, Stefanile, Ciardi and From the Margin, Writings by Italian Americans from Purdue U. Press and enjoyed them better for their craft and imagination. There are many good Italian American poets who reach more out of themselves into the world. Gillan's not dreadful, just not very original as these other Italian American writers. Perhaps, she should stick to editing. I recommend the other authors named above as more fully realized poets and they are all available at Amazon.com, too.

I love this book. It is honest, direct, moving, and explores the territory of the ordinary life of a woman in poems that lift off the page, they are so lyrical and brilliant. Maria Mazziotti Gillan leads us on a journey into her Italian-American working-class girlhood and explores the complexity of carrying that girl inside her for the rest of her life. This a book about relationships within a family, mothers, fathers, children,husband, friends, place --all are clearly delineated and evocatively expressed. Anyone interested in Italian American literature or working class literature or literature by women should read this book. It is wonderful. i keep it next to my bed to read it againa and again.

Gillan's poetry in "Things" is not safe poetry, which is what Gillan's critic from NY is apparently looking for in a book of poems. Yes, many of Gillan's poems are prose poems and do challenge traditional notions about what makes a poem. That's her point in "Things." In poems such as "Zia Concetta and Her Whalebone Corset" and "My Father's First Car," the form looks like prose. But no matter what form her poems take, they qualify as poems by where they take us as a reader: first into the emotions that Gillan expresses and then into the very real places from which these poems are derived in experience. In "Family Vacations" and many others in the volume like it, Gillan demonstrates that she can write in more traditional forms. Her poems are meaningful expressions of what it means to grow up as an Italian American woman in contemporary society. "Things" has a place on anyone's reading list who is interested in gender and ethnic identity in American society.