Circus in the Fog:  Poems 2005-2006
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  May 2009.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
88 pages, with a black and white photograph of the author by Joy L. Glass, Piazza Ruggero Settimo, Palermo, Sicily (Italy), on the frontispiece.
7.5 x 4.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-13:  978-0-9793507-26.
ISBN-10:  0-9793507-2-7.
Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy:  Sotoportego Editore, 2009.

RETAIL PRICE: $20.00 (includes postage and handling)

In Circus in the Fog:  Poems 2005-2006, a book that might just as well have been subtitled, “Poems of Sicily,” the author, Richard Milazzo, who has written often and eloquently of Palermo in the past, his father’s birthplace, writes for the first time about the isle of Sicily, its people, its cultural heritage and his family.  Figures such as Antonello da Messina in Cefalu, the grandparents on the author’s mother’s side of the family in the slum town of old Favara in the southern province of Agrigento, Lazarus, Artaud, Anna Ahkmatova, Rosario Gagliardi of Ragusa Ibla, all figure somehow into the mix.  The ‘circus in the fog’ – a kind of half-breed, gypsy ontology – is everywhere full of the sea, blood, stone, hyacinth, snow, “broken kisses” and the black branch in winter.  Evocative of Lawrence Durrell’s “Sicilian Carousel” and Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques,” it is written in a verse style that is in places leud but always graceful and full of “Carthaginian grace.”  And lurking in the shadows of this perpetual winter of our discontent, we find fragments of New York City – a city that “means next to nothing to me” – Basel, London, Paris, St. Louis (Missouri) and Santa Monica (California).  “The world is a circus lost in a fog.”