Annie’s Books
Whaddyacall the Wind?
Bordighera Press, 295pp, ISBN 978-1-59954-193-8
with Foreword by Edvige Giunta
A poetic tarantella of the heart. Walk, tremble and fall in the Matriamia, cry for connection from alleyways up to open windows. Expose your heart. Know what it is to feel "like an errant puzzle piece... never to be found, never to be put into place." A New Yorker learns to walk on Sanpietrini, connects with gay community in the Matriamia, finds living cousins by hanging out in the village cemetery, talks to a Saint who sees ecstasy in stirring fava beans, learns of the Duchess who bit off the saint's finger, argues with Pulcinella, envisions the epic journey of a painting of La Madonna through four seas to get from Constantinople to Acquaviva delle Fonti, sells wind to sailors, avoids draughts, tangos Sciroccazzo, builds a bridge of hearts and asks the question: "What position do you want to be in for l'eternità?"
Literary Nonfiction. Film. LGBTQ+ Studies. Women's Studies. Italian Studies. Poetry. Working Class Studies.
L is for Lion: an italian bronx butch freedom memoir
SUNY PRESS, 335pp, ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4526-7
2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Award Finalist in Lesbian Memoir.
A 1960s Bronx tomboy learns how to survive her brutal but humorous Italian family and all the rest that life throws her. The harder you hit the pavement, the higher you fly.
A Bronx tomboy’s 1960’s girlhood is marked by her father’s lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her mediastinum. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by lessons of lasagna vows and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer ward to New York City’s gay club scene of the ’80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from the cave underneath the dining room table to the stoop, sidewalk, street, and ultimately out into the world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, PTSD, domestic violence, and an array of characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, the journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest peachiest essence of soul.
Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning and Stage Light; and Pitch Roll Yaw
Guernica World Editions, 400pp, ISBN 9781771833059
with introductions by Kathleen Zamboni-McCormick, and John Gennari
Hard Candy / Pitch Roll Yaw — a bare knuckle punch from beyond the grave— is two books in one volume; a flip book of two collections facing each other and upside down to one another. The two books collide in the center in a gallery of spiral poetry. Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light offers poems and prose on the eternal relationship of the poet and her mother. Pitch Roll Yaw is fourteen stations each beginning with a See-Saw poem–Lanzillotto's one liners balanced by a fulcrum: comma, caesura, spondee, dash, or backslash, with quick shifts in weight and changes in meaning. Each station is unified by theme or form.
Watch the 2018 Book Trailer.
Schistsong
Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
Bordighera Press, 113pp, ISBN 978-1-5995-4052-8
with Introduction by Rosette Capotorto
An urban songline of New York. A panegyric of the geology of Manhattan. These poems glitter. Manhattan schist is rendered as a template for the skyline and characters of New York. Grit and stardust, icemen and fish peddlers, butchers of hearts, meter maids, Grandma’s magic hands, children of immigrants who fell out windows and died in garage explosions, crushed tomatoes and sunsets, the glory of hot tar, the lessons of U.S. Marines, lesbians, spiritual imperatives, — all through the syllables of one poet’s soul.
Read Annie’s Writing In These Anthologies
Spaghetti Sissies Queering Italian American Media, edited by Sole Anatrone and Julia Heim
Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire, edited by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti
Gastropolis: Food & New York City, edited by Jonathan Deutsch, Annie Hauck-Lawson.
Works of HeART: Village Through the Arts, edited by Lynne Elizabeth, Suzanne Young. CLICK BOOK COVER to read Annie's essay here
Paterson Literary Review, edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. CLICK BOOK COVER to read Annie's poem "Nerina."
The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food, edited by Louise DeSalvo, Edvige Giunta. CLICK BOOK COVER to read Annie's poem "Triple Bypass."
Our Roots are Deep With Passion, edited by Joanna Clapps Herman, Lee Gutkind.
Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora, edited by Edvige Giunta, Joseph Sciorra.
Italian American Writers on New Jersey, edited by Jennifer Gillan, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Edvige Giunta.