Hard Bread - Paperback

by Peg Boyers (Author)

The poems in Peg Boyers's Hard Bread are "spoken" in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life-her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese-much is invented. The result is a book by turns melancholy and acerbic, mournful and satiric, contemplative and combative.

Front Jacket

The poems in Peg Boyers's "Hard Bread" are "spoken" in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life--her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese--much is invented. The result is a book by turns melancholy and acerbic, mournful and satiric, contemplative and combative.

Author Biography

Peg Boyers is the executive editor of Salmagundi magazine at Skidmore College.