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The Bordighera Poetry Prize

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Winner of the 2006 Bordighera Poetry Prize:
Sponsored by the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation
Emily Ferrara for The Alchemy of Grief

1st Runner-up: Michael LaSorsa Steffen for Pre-mature Gods

Awards Ceremony, Nov. 8th, 2007; Calandra Inst' NY

Mother's Lament | Cremation| The Winter After

Emily Ferrara, the 2006 winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize, has published poems in The Worcester Review, Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Family Medicine, Full Circle, Lifeboat, Lynx Eye, and several anthologies. Her poems have received awards from the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine in 2005, and from the Worcester County Poetry Association and the Center for New Words in 2006. The Alchemy of Grief will be her first full length book. She is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she teaches and has developed curricula in creative writing, communication skills, mindfulness meditation, and cultural competence in medicine. Ferrara also directs the grants and special projects division for the school’s Office of Medical Education. She earned a BS in Communications from Boston University, and a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from Lesley University. Born and raised in Bridgeport, CT, Ferrara resides in Worcester, MA., with her life partner M. Lara Hoke, and daughter Deva Jasheway.

Distinguished Poet Judge for 2005-2006, Daniela Gioseffi, has said of Ferrara's poetry: "This is excellently controlled craftsmanship, conveying deeply felt emotion. The grief of loss is sharply poignant and real, yet never maudlin or self-indulgent. The music of the lines is subtle and fine. The tension between the controlled craft and the poignancy of the theme makes the reader participate in the poems and feel with the poet, sharing the human despair and transcendent emotions that bring us through to survival. This book shares with all of us the profound theme of the loss of a child to fate, one many American parents can identify with in these dark days of our republic."

Sabine Pascarelli, translator of Ferrara's book, lives in Tuscany with her husband and two sons. She grew up in Germany where she earned a degree in German language and literature at Dortmund University. She is an author of children's literature and has won a fiction award from La Spezia, Italy. Her most recent book is Glenscheck & Co. Pascarelli has published her poems in various anthologies in both Italian and English. As a translator of English, Italian, and German, she currently translates for the historic resort Montegufoni in Montagnana.

The Bordighera Poetry Prize was founded by Daniela Gioseffi and Alfredo de Palchi, a trustee of The Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation, in 1997. Former winners and translators have been: Lewis Turco for A Book of Fears, translated by Joseph Alessio; Joe Salerno for The Tulip Tree, translated by Emanuel diPasquale; Luisa Rossini Villani for Running Away from Russia translated by Luigi Fontanella; Stephen Massimilla for Forty Floors from Yesterday translated by Luigi Bonaffini; Jane Tassi for And Song Song Songlessness, translated by Ned Condini, West Pullman by Carolyn Guinzio, translated by Franco Nasi, and Water on the Sun by Grace Cavalieri, translated by Maria Enrico. Former distinguished poet judges have been: Felix Stefanile, W.S. Di Piero, Dorothy Barresi, Donna Massini, and Daniela Gioseffi. Each judge serves for a two-year term. Guidelines for entry winners' and judges' work at: Bordighera Prize Guidelines

Sample poems by Emily Ferrara follow:

from The Alchemy of Grief

Mother’s Lament

 Your feet tagged,
tinged blue, hang
over the gurney’s edge.
Head thrust back,
mouth slack,
hands folded cold
turning colder.
I reach for life
in your muscled body,
carefully sheathed.
Your cropped hair still
grows warm. I murmur,
touch your head, place
my mouth to your cheek.
Wrench free the taut sheet.
See your penis at rest:
crimson, pure, your blood rushed
all your lean pubescence to ripen there.
I want to cast out the affront
of the yellow catheter
still inserted in you.
All I want is your flesh,
slick and warm as the day
you were born.

Cremation

I.
The man who tended you wore gloves.
He did not pray. He worked the rake
through your remains, then swept
the chamber of your nakedness,
ground to seven pounds of pale
bone and ash in a wooden urn.

II.
Under a swatch of blue I scavenge
for you: gulls plunder
an empty lifeguard chair,
whitecaps rush the shore.
Every beach brims with sorrow
and kindnesses. Brims with you.

The Winter After

Sitting in my room before sunrise
I clasp my breath. Since yesterday
snow has been falling, hushed,
measurable in feet. By my bed
the window screen fills with snow.
I am blind to the lake below,
its ashen face, its brokenness.
I am lashed to its icefields.
Unseen geese bleed
through this gauze, dispassionate.
They fill the air with howling.
What does it matter?
This is not their story.

I made an altar in his room.
The ceramic Buddha, muted
gold and taupe, holds his favorite
guitar pick in a cupped palm.
The figure is draped with two cloths,
gifts friends gave me at the funeral:
a red and ochre prayer scarf, and the
100-year-old handkerchief to hold
the grief of a mother for her son.

I go to his room, bow down
to my penance, open
the bureau drawer, choose a sweater—
today olive green trimmed gray.
‘You never wear your own clothes anymore’
says my daughter, wondering
what’s become of her mother.

(First published in The Worcester Review)
_____________________________________________________________
Copyright © 2006 by Emily Ferrara from The Alchemy of Grief, forthcoming from Bordighera Press, 2007.

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