REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
LAUNCHING LIGHTNING BOLTS WITH EMARI DIGIORGIO: A REVIEW BY AND INTERVIEW WITH MICAH DELA CUEVA
April 6, 2021
"In The Things A Body Might Become (TTABMB) and Girl Torpedo (GT), the body shapeshifts into the metaphysical, the aethereal, and the untamed—all continuously becoming. Emari DiGiorgio holds a lightning bolt in her fist as she writes against the violence and expectations that men place on women’s bodies. In her poems, she evokes a rite of passage where the body demands to show its anger and hurt while viscerally portraying what the body also does to survive—a balance of reclaiming one’s body and grieving the violence acted upon the body."
-Micah Dela Cueva
RIVER HERON REVIEW: CONVERSATIONS WITH EMARI DIGIORGIO
June 10, 2020
"We first met Emari and experienced her poetry several years ago at Peter Murphy’s Winter Poetry and Prose Get-a-way where she did readings and facilitated poetry writing workshops. We were immediately taken by her powerful use of accessible and multifaceted language."
-River Heron Review staff
AN ACT OF SURVIVAL: INTERVIEW WITH EMARI DIGIORGIO ON GIRL TORPEDO
March 5, 2018
"Girl Torpedo seems to hover and dance in liminal spaces: between fight and surrender, between hope and grief. Even the title creates a tension between two concepts that initially seem incredibly varied: girl and torpedo, a child and a weapon. Do you see the book as arriving at a unification of sorts, or does the gulf remain? Is disappearance the resolution?"
-Jessica Walsh
ON EMARI DIGIORGIO’S THE THINGS A BODY MIGHT BECOME
February 27, 2018
"After all of the tragedies and traumas inflicted on women’s bodies, what’s more powerful than a woman demanding pleasure for herself? Because, of course, the personal is political. It is an act of joyful resistance to end this collection with a woman’s body reaching out to another body, praying to be kissed, to be heard. As her body might become many things, so too, might the world that threatens her. Just maybe, DiGiorgio offers, darkness is capable of 'wrapping its long arms around this fire we’d built.'"
–Danielle DeTiberus
February 9, 2018
"Many of the poems in her collection are visceral shots across the bow, shots fired by barbarian armies and barbarian babykillers of all stripes. She writes as a a kind of poet-journalist, hoping for a newswriter’s objectivity despite a mindfucked world. But it’s no go, and The Things a Body Might Become is drenched in a poet’s proper sorrow."
–Mark Fogerty
REVIEW OF GIRL TORPEDO
January 20, 2018
"This collection, in one sense a catalogue of crimes from the perspectives of their victims or survivors, gains tremendous strength from the poet’s unflinching observation of sensory details. Indeed, DiGiorgio’s interwoven conveyance of the senses gives her poetry a unique precision. This is poetry of witness, unskewed by the false lens of redemption."
–Ann Davenport
A REVIEW OF THE THINGS A BODY MIGHT BECOME
January 1, 2018
"As I was reading The Things a Body Might Become, I thought of Jorie Graham’s poem, 'Hybrid of Plants and of Ghosts,' where she writes, 'I understand that it is grafting, / this partnership of lost wills, common flowers.' DiGiorgio creates a magnificent 'other' from the wounded, the powerless, and the women searching for healing and completeness."
-Jennifer Martelli
November 27, 2017
Emari DiGiorgio premiered her first published book of poems, The Things A Body Might Become at World Above, an open reading series she hosts every month at the Noyes Arts Garage in Atlantic City. As an undergraduate, Emari studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn at Stockton University. Fast forward, and she’s now a prize-winning poet herself and a full professor teaching in the same university.
Her poems deal with racism, sexism, and social justice, and she teaches a class where students are trained to use poetry as a way to engage with under-served communities.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT: EMARI DIGIORGIO
July 1, 2016
Featuring AWP members who represent AWP’s mission to foster literary achievement, to advance the art of writing as essential to a good education, and to serve the makers, teachers, students, and readers of contemporary writing.