My Life as an Island: Poems [Paperback]

Whether portraying the hardscrabble poor living along the Mississippi River or staring as Guillaume Apollinaire stared into Le Seine in Paris, Travis Mossotti evokes the ghosts of his own working-class family. His urgent meditations upon three generations of Italian-American men torn apart by economic hardship and death transport us, in achingly beautiful detail, to the Meramec River and Missouri hills of a bygone era. In My Life as an Island, Mossotti sings of St. Louis, of a heritage the poet equates with 'the crumbled red brick fa?ade / of burned-out warehouses on the edge / of a river that is more American / than I can stand.' --Marcus Cafag?a, author ofThe Broken WorldandRoman Fever

Travis Mossotti teaches English at Lindenwood University, and his poetry has appeared in theAntioch Review,Manchester Review,Prairie Schooner,Poetry Ireland Review,Southwest Review,The Writer's Almanac,Verse Daily,Western Humanities Reviewand many others.