Praise for A Tune Both Familiar and Strange
“These poems take us to places as far flung as Tasmania or Afghanistan, Israel or Iceland, letting us see across time and space into the lives of others, but also into the love and loss of Del Bourgo’s own life. The strange becomes familiar as she braids her narratives with images so precise they seem cinematic. Whether elegies, love poems, or lyrics of wild imagining, these poems are marked by tenderness and compassion, even when the difficult or brutal is acknowledged.”
- Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting
“Rafaella Del Bourgo’s A Tune Both Familiar and Strange is the book of a lifetime, both in the sense that her first major publication is coming late in her life, and because it sweeps through that life, beginning with her Sephardic grandparents, their views and far flung travels, her own parents, her lovers, journeys, drug adventures, and much more, circling back to her beginnings in an afterlife. With moments of magical realism and comedy, she is movingly, quietly, startingly insightful. Here, from early in the book, she writes of her father’s hypocrisy: ‘His kisses on my cheek/ bristle like points of a star.// See? Those are my tears/ dripping from his eyes.’ A Tune Both Familiar and Strange is a debut not to be missed.”
—Richard Silberg, author of The Horses. New and Selected Poems; Associate Editor of Poetry Flash
“Rafaella Del Bourgo has just gifted us with her new book, A Tune Both Familiar and Strange. ‘My life,’ she has written in one poem, ‘has been composed of tessellated bits: meals, trips, jobs, books, men I have followed like a gypsy, or one of those wind-up toys that hits a wall and careens off in another direction.’ Her poems are happy/sad, fearless/edgy, thoughtful/passionate, and about the clothed/unclothed as she propels us through Afghanistan, Iceland, Hungary, Portugal, Tasmania and countless other countries where her poems, set in these foreign places, are beautiful/wild/tender/serious/clever as she writes about Father, Mother, grandparents, strangers, lovers, animals, self. This book is amazing. You should read it!”
—Susan Terris, author of Green Leaves, Unseeing
“Rafaella Del Bourgo’s poems in A Tune Both Familiar and Strange are impassioned and attentive. She has a novelist’s sense of narrative, an artist’s eye for images, and a poet’s ear for the music and magic of language. The poems are rich and varied, turning dreams and journeys into revelations and stories. Whether she is writing about her grandmother’s life in Eritrea and Shanghai or cows at the kitchen window in Tasmania, you will want to hear what she has to say as you savor moments drizzled with sizzling olive oil and scented with lilacs. A fantastic book!”
—Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho. Co-editor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California
