SNIPPETS FROM REVIEWS
for THE POETESS
Ruggieri’s persona becomes a kind of seer, an interpreter of events, possessing knowledge beyond a phantom human level.
John Jacob, ALA Booklist for The Poetess
for JERSEY GIRLS
Jersey Girls take heart. A brand new version of your anthem has just been released with lyrics altogether different from those first moaned by The Boss 15 years ago in what was then the Byrne Arena.
And even better news? The words don’t celebrate proletarian male possessiveness and macho bluster. Instead this “Jersey Girl” is written from a woman’s point of view, telling of HER nakedly carnal yearnings down at the Jersey Shore.
She wants: “ . . . to sing by the ocean and/sleep by the sea. . . to dance in a glass room/ with someone who lives to move. . . . [who can convey] that pulse in me/ a shell for my heart// slick oily bodies/competing for attention/ . . . all sultry and salt.”
Sound good? Well it is. But the bad news for Springsteen fans is, it’s not by Bruce, . . . it’s a poem by Helen Ruggieri, contained in Under a Gull’s Wing: Poems of the Jersey Shore (Down the Shore Publishing_.
By Mark McGarrity, Star Ledger – the Newspaper for New Jersey.
for CONCRETE MADONNA
This is a witty, perceptive book . . . . Ruggieri’s triumph, breaking through in poem after poem, is her refusal to drown in the bitter seas one inevitably swims in . . . .Her humor is caustic. . . The poems have a tough vulnerability, and vulnerable people are so much more interesting than those who claim to have their shit together.
Craig Underwood on Concrete Madonna published in Pawn Review.
"...at once bitter and lyrical and full of the mordant wit Ruggieri brings to all her work.”
Robin K. Willoughby in Niagara Erie Writers Newsletter
for GLIMMER GIRLS
Ruggieri’s poems create a landscape in which girls practice becoming women. . . . a world of spit curls and plucked eyebrows and twirling skirts, a world of dreams and disappointments, of chasing boys and being chased. The universality of the adolescent experience is rendered in these insightful poems with grace, ease and understanding. What a pleasure to read this book ...
Francine Sterle, Amazon.com
. . . .how perfectly you’ve seized a time in our collective history, and in so many individual baby-boomer histories in the small towns of America . . . . These are really quite wonderful poems. I recognize every person here, and every kind of evening and car and street and fields, and I know those boys, and have been the girl who threads through so many of the poems as persona. I didn’t think I could be caused to remember her so well. I have always admired the ability to evoke the past that pungently, and you do it, you do and do.
Diana Hume George
.There are any number of poems in this book that deserve to be in an anthology . . . but if I had to pick one, it would be “Carrie Myers – Balloonist.” In beautifully written, unsparing terms, Ruggieri tells the saga of a balloonist who fell to her death in Olean, NY in 1907, and whose body was never claimed. The poem is both strongly feminist and heroic. And aren’t the last words, a clear example of this author’s own daring, probing talent and lifelong commitment to poetry?
Thomas Krampf
for THE CHARACTER FOR WOMAN
You’ll enjoy reading her experiences with kimono wrapping and the traditional tea ceremony. In every section of the book, Ruggieri is honest, unpretentious and tells us her thoughts and feelings on living in a foreign culture.
www.writers-ezine.com
for THE AMISH WOMAN
a haibun published in World Haiku Review and selected as a definitive example of the genre by Ray Rasmussen, haibun editor.
One hesitates to choose one haibun as outstanding among a body of good, heartfelt writing. . . . First her use of description is strong, I can visualize the scene . . . .Second, the content . . . in this haibun we see an interesting clash of two cultures, Amish-old and modern poetic. Third, we are treated to both the sensory as well as the inner workings of the author’s mind. Fourth, it contains poetic writing . . . one that particularly caught my attention and admiration is: “We meet treading time as if it were water . . . .” wish I had written that!
Ray Rasmussen, haibun editor
for ROTHKO’S CHAPEL
All of us at Cezanne’s Carrot love your creative nonfiction story. . . . This is unusual and very thought-provoking; a powerful telling of the experience; the lines of poetry were very fitting. I loved this strong and powerful piece – it put me right in the space.
Joan Kremer and all the editors
from a teacher
Ruggieri, with an intense regard for right diction and informing imagery, looks at those things that come her way – both from books and from her rural river town of Olean, NY – and saves them for us, saves them from passing into oblivion, saves their enduring values. She is an explorer, a discoverer, who sees the large worth in otherwise small tings . . . .”
John Balaban