Familial Animals

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Paolo Bicchieri’s debut poetry collection, Familial Animals, is both haunted and haunting. Haunted by the ghosts of intergenerational trauma, sexual abuse, alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness… these poems search for ways to keep body and soul intact. The speaker is always in motion, both literally and metaphorically, and leads the reader through deceptively familiar landscapes all the while reminding us that nothing is at it danger lurks behind every word. The language of Bicchieri’s poetry is almost mystical in nature and transcends the horrors of an ugly reality with a nod to magical realism. so I’m eating a breakfast of black beans and tortillas when the world stops turning/when the street cracks open/when the wind stills and the blackberries burst/the sun is sheer like xacto… Central to this collection is the exploration of an eating disorder in the context of hauntings. What better way to exorcise ghosts than to become a ghost yourself? If a person becomes small enough, then they can hide from the monsters waiting in the front yard, in the bedroom, in the garden, in the car, just over the horizon. The transformational nature of the poems in this collection also means that Bicchieri’s own words become the key out of the locked room into something that might be hope and is certainly redemption.