Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Marianne Gambaro, based in Massachusetts, with two poems, each a tribute to one of her grandmothers, both of whom immigrated to the US from Europe between the wars. “According to Aunt Rose” recounts a moment after her father’s funeral when an aunt regaled them “with the story of a girl who,/ barely in her teens,/ left her home in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius/ to visit her older sister in America.” What this girl, Marianne’s grandmother, did not know was her sister was dead and her family had agreed on a new role for her that she never could have imagined for herself. Can you imagine reaching the shores of a new place to find that your destiny had been decided for you? Women have always sacrificed for family, but the immigrant experience often intensifies those sacrifices. “She Died When I Was 2” is a wistful musing on her Dutch grandmother. “I don’t remember her/ but she is here—/ in my cobby body,/ my sable eyes, my once dark wavy hair…” Marianne’s verses are filled with descriptive imagery and alliterative music. Regret never capsizes the enormity of either woman’s achievement in making a life in a new country, and yet we wonder how they might have shaped their lives if they had been offered choices.
Read Marianne’s moving poems in our “Family” issue, available at https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Like her grandmothers who emigrated from Italy and The Netherlands a century ago, Marianne Gambaro left her native New Jersey for Massachusetts’ verdant Pioneer Valley several decades ago. There she writes and gardens with her photographer husband and two feline muses.
Her early career as a journalist is often reflected in the narrative style of her poetry. A committed humane volunteer, she does enrichment with stray and injured cats at her regional animal shelter, socializing them and preparing them for adoption. Her poems and essays have been published in several print and online journals. Her chapbook, Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers, was published by Finishing Line Press.