Italian Lessons by Christine Johnson-Duell

My poetry chapbook includes meditations on family, food, opera, and visual art, through the lens of my Italian heritage.

In Christine Johnson-Duell’s deft hands, Italian Lessons don’t just teach us how to speak. They teach us how to sing, how to go. These poems are hungry but patient, curious and wise, like travelers anticipating well-earned meals that will further confirm what they learned on their journeys: to have a body is to discover the ways one becomes a figure of joy, a keeper of memory, a vessel of sorrow, an instrument of art.

—Kate Lebo, Author of Pie School, The Book of Difficult Fruit, A Commonplace Book of Pie, and co-editor, Pie and Whiskey