Vanzetti's Fish Cart

". . . in clear, beautiful poems, depicts the immigrant ambivalence in re an adopted country. . . . The poet moves from the personal to the universal and back again, weaving humor, fragments of conversation, sideswipes at petty prejudices. . . . The book ends on a note of affirmation, a kind of salvation forged through increased self-knowledge and the hope engendered by love. Vanzetti's Fish Cart is an impressive achievement." - Maria Mazziotti Gillan in Paterson Literary Review

". . . Vitiello's geography bridges the emotional space between life in the ancestral villages and the Little Italies of urban America, and the wide open lands of strangers in between. What's exciting about Vitiello's poetry is the way he weaves a personal tapestry from the threads of the various cultures he's lived in and studied. . . . Vitiello shows his poetic skills, balancing his phrasing so well that his poem neither falls into sentimental nostalgia nor slips into pompous glorification of the past. He connects present to past and memory to myth so well that it's hard to tell them apart. . ." - Fred L. Gardaphe in fra noi

"Here is a poet both classical and personal (ergo modern) at the same time, a writer whose sense of compression and tautness of language is ultra modern, yet who is able to render a poem in the classical mood within these modern modes. . . Vitiello always mixes mystery with his realism, leaving out just enough to always create a true poem. . . . These are insights no one else had before Justin Vitiello and they are rendered always in language that is just as unique. Here is a book of supreme pleasure and edification at the same time." - Joe Papaleo

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