spuytenduyvil

Reading ali lanzetta is like running wild all summer with someone you share a secret language with. Her writing is playful, soulful, profuse, and altogether alive. It’s the work of someone who’s made up her mind that you two are going to be great friends.

     Mike DeCapite, author of Jacket Weather

 

 

This book is pure magic with its perfect storm of wit, heartbreak, joy and unrelenting hope. I want to invoke the language from within but I don’t possess the magic to capture the complexities and brilliance of ali lanzetta’s marmalade in a single statement. You’ll just have to read this for yourself and know that you will be forever changed. Can we as readers be kinder having experienced the language and presence of the writer, of another? I say yes. It is here in this time, in this gift of a book.

     Truong Tran, author of book of the other

 

 

In marmalade, ali lanzetta’s wondrous debut book, each page, each poem shines forthwith a voice as  singular and full of light as you’ll ever find. Here is a poet who writes with humor, depth, revelation, wonder, and it’s a wonder how she does it but she does. In her poem, “escape hatch”, we find the lines, “i smartly broke the moment. this, my area of expertise, the shimmering snap.” This book is full to the brim of that shimmering snap, and her one-of-a-kind, smart, lyrical voice breaks in, breaks the moment, breaks us out of any malaise or doubt we might feel these days. John Steinbeck once wrote of his desire to “spread each page with shining.” This is

just what ali lanzetta has done, page after page after page.

     Toni Mirosevich, author of Spell Heaven