Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry. Essays. Italian American Studies. "Although it is true that I distanced myself from my youth, of course (everybody does), I never distanced myself from my ethnicity. I simply write poems and stories--and, of recent decades, essays and memoirs--as they occur to me, and if later on I feel that older material can be mined, transformed, or linked together to form longer works or sequences, so be it. That's what I have done in this book."