Author Description

Review "We stayed for hours," said the Baltimore girl, remembering long days of dipping for blue crabs with her father, back when the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. As a proud son of Crabtown, USA, I advise you do the same with this collection of poems. Do it when no one is around. Savor it like a sip of Nehi grape, wipe your thumb on the pages and go back to the beginning. --Rafael Alvarez, author, Tales from the Holy Land Baltimore Girls is a brief collection of poems that examines the poet's early life in the 1960s and the culture in which she grew up. It is personal history--tales of a small group of young women who lived in the segregated city of my youth. The poems are mini-memoirs, snapshots of young women who had determined they were bound for greater things: "we were in a hurry to get out of town, out of state, through school, to a job..." Although Viti tells us she "left as fast as she could," her memories of people, places and her hometown culture remain vivid and sharp, filled with the manners and rituals of the era. She recounts a teen-age date as "a talisman of my life to come" because they spent the time talking "about the war, about Yeats..." This collection is significant for its realism, its honesty and its attention to detail. The poems are specific and descriptive, reminiscent of the lyric realism of James T. Farrell. This book establishes Viti as a poet of the memoir and local history. Her memories of time and place will resonate with many readers. --Sam Cornish, Poet Laureate of Boston, Massachusetts, 2008-2014 Viti's Baltimore poems are bred of deep listening and long looking from a place beyond reflex and lead us back into the topography of an earlier time. We see the ways the talismans we carry guard both our years to come and those already lived; the ways those we've loved are with us still in some universe where we all dance with abandon. --Gina Maranto, University of Miami, Abess Center for Ecosyste