Buoyant

Poetry
Setting: Oceans of the world
Publisher: Bellowing Ark Press
Date available: now
Price: US$23  ISBN: 978-0-944920-64-0
Language: English

Available at: Bookshop Santa Cruz (The book is on their shelves though it doesn’t appear on their website. To order a copy to be sent to you, message me.) You will need to collect these in person from the bookstore. I can also send a copy to you if you message me.

Responses to Buoyant

In Anna Citrino’s lyrical new poetry collection Buoyant, she guides us through a magical, alluring, ever-changing world of the sea and its denizens, many of whom she encounters on scuba dives at close range and with heart-stopping clarity and vision. The poems are sensual and full of wonder, “… break(ing) us open with surprise, with awe—/enough to allow us to grow humble, vulnerable/ enough that we could rise from the water/ wanting to learn how to live.”  She urges us to attend to and better care for this vast awe-inspiring portion of the planet: “What do I want from this life I hold?/What we attend to grows.” Since so few of us have opportunities to visit this subterranean world, how fortunate we are to have such a gifted poet exploring the oceans of the world and returning to gift us with her vision.  –Gail Entrekin, Editor, Canary (canarylitmag.org)

One dreams of following Citrino on her swim throughs and boat rides. Honored women divers, memories of Maldives beaches, and night dives beyond imagination—eavesdropping on Citrino’s dives, we see how in tune she is with the threats facing Earth’s underwater life. Anna Citrino’s Buoyant is unique as a collection of divers’ poems, sweeping, with an imaginative and sensitively emotional style of expression—a poetic account of the value of marine environments revealed in poetic beauty.
-–Dr. Martha Began Crawford, science educator and dive enthusiast 

Poetry, at its best can heal language –and in this fine collection of seaworthy poems Citrino, offers us enchanting incantations so we may view into the kaleidoscope of relationships that bring our oceans to life. The implication of this work is that our all-too-hidden world is what ultimately supports and sustains all life on our water planet, and we must wake up to our responsibility to it. Her scientific observations become mesmerizing meditations as she blends beginner’s mind with a mystic’s appetite for wonder. Her poems beckon our attention at this critical time in human history by offering us fuel to do the necessary work to live in right-relationship with the seas that sustain life. Humans will ultimately protect what they love and Anna’s remarkable poems, photos and prose give us fuel for the journey on every page. This is an important time to pay attention to this poet. –Mary Quillin, poet

Buoyant, Anna Citrino’s newest book, is a remarkable achievement. It takes a reader deep into a world that most people do not know exists. It is a poetic exploration of underwater life around the world through the eyes of an experienced deep-sea diver. Hundreds of varieties of sea life appear in these poems, as the writer swims among them. Many of the creatures described are unknown to the average person such as myself who has not spent hundreds of hours submerged in the ocean and other bodies of water. The language in these poems is richly detailed, and frequently rises in a verbal music that soars in ways that are wildly romantic and profoundly insightful. I recommend this book unreservedly to anyone who enjoys fine poetry or has interest in the rich life of the sea.  —Michael L. Newell, author of Diddley-Bop-She-Bop, Making My Peace, and Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge.  

It is a blessing to see, to feel, to hear, to taste and to touch this crystalline world through the Anna’s art. She has a personal and sacred rapport with our blue planet and she brings it to us profoundly. I have been taken into the depths of sea with this compendium of Anna’s poetry. I have traveled in my life and will continue to travel and delve into other places and delight in the curious cultures of our planet, but into the sea is one place that I doubt I shall go to. Yet, after my immersion and baptism through Anna’s work, I am sure that I could convince you that I have been below that gossamer fabric of the surface of the ocean into the depths beneath. —Tom Postlewaite, Montessori educator and sailor

In this second collection of poems, Anna Citrino takes us into the watery world of ocean’s depths. In the poem, “What Tony Taught Us” she writes, “The point of diving is to observe, to look deeply, to let go into being.” So, these poems ask the same of her readers, to “surrender to the sea’s fluid language/open to the worlds it speaks.” (From “A Fluid Language). With vivid, precise and loving description, we are introduced to creatures we may or may not know, or perhaps will see now in a different light; as in “On Variations of Jelly Fish” where they are described with “ruffled lace falling from their mouths.” This poet/diver delivers up guitar fish, nurse shark, glassfish, mandarin, manta, harlequin ghost pipe fish, dolphins…and in the poem, “Blessing the Waters” we seem to get them all conjured before us. The book is a blessing of sorts, with the poet singing in ocean’s voice, urging us to enter a larger life so that “the boundaries of our hearts be broken.” – Magdalena Montagne, poet, author of Earth My Witness

A Space Between

Available from Bordighera Press
Amazon
Barnes and Noble 
Book Depository
Small Press Distributor

Story and history told as narrative poetry
Setting: Calabria, Italy & San Francisco, California, late 1800’s through 1960’s
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Date available: now
Price: US$16  ISBN: 978-1-59954-149-5
Language: English

Making a home while living between worlds can fulfill dreams. It can also cost you your life. Enter San Francisco’s turn of the century world through the eyes of an immigrant Italian family as they cope with complex challenges to their traditional way of life during a time of speakeasies, government corruption, natural disaster, the opening of the Golden Gate, and neighbors being sent to internment camps.

After a life threatening moment at the turn of the last century, Gaetano, a barber, leaves Calabria in Southern Italy, and immigrates to California to start a new life so his wife Luisa can later join him. Narrated in a several character’s voices, the poems tell the story of people between places and definitions searching for how to redefine themselves and feel at home as they encounter celebrations, losses, delights, difficulty and disaster. Consider what it means to be American, reflect on what carries us through transition’s hardship, and join this family in their journey across a space between worlds.

What others have said about A Space Between

Anna Citrino’s A Space Between is a powerful and moving immigrant family narrative that takes the reader from impoverished Calabria in the landscape of Italy to the challenging new world of San Francisco. She takes us inside the lives of these immigrants and all their difficulties while living between two worlds. They want their children to become American but the Americans do not see them in that way. In their hearts, they live by the old rules that Italians have lived by for generations—that if they work to find a place in America where they can be safe and raise their children, they can forge an identity between two worlds.

Citrino is an amazing writer. Her poems are lyric narratives that draw us in until we feel that we are part of the story she tells. I guarantee you will love this book and will want to read the poems again and again.
–Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner

“A Space Between” is a massive, ambitious effort of epic proportions that rewards with its interweavings of history, consequence, heritage and legacy. How heartening it is to witness in these poems the resonance through generations of immigration and sacrifice to provide for living, surviving, prospering. As the author smartly observes in her tight oxymoron, “Light hauls its weight from stone to stone,” it is refreshing to see forward in appreciation by looking back into the past that never leaves us.
–-Nicholas Samaras

Anna Citrino has woven the story of Italian immigrants – their small joys and compelling heartache – into a moonlit tapestry.  Thread by poetic thread, this book is an exquisite fabric of personal journeys, cultural insights, and little known Italian-American history. I loved entering this “space between,” which Anna created with great love and profound grace.
– Catherine Ann Lombard, author, psychosynthesis psychologist, counselor and researcher

Anna Citrino’s new book, A Space Between, is that rarity in books of poetry, a book that coheres, where everything is of a piece. The book tells a story of a family’s history in two different countries. It is a book of narrative poetry that is also rich in carefully observed imagery, and that uses dialogue skillfully and carefully. The book brings vividly alive the immigrant experience. The differences between the two worlds that the characters inhabit are rendered with skill and delicacy, and manage to marry the gentle with the rowdy, the life affirming with that which threatens life, and to reveal that which is lost while celebrating that which is gained in the experience of immigrant life. A Space Between has epic sweep rendered in a wide range of voices, each distinctive, each compelling to a reader. The book is a remarkable achievement in its ability to create a family’s multi-generational history, to bring a wide array of characters vibrantly alive, and to make the ordinary events of ordinary lives into something extraordinary. This cycle of poems weds historical sweep to a lyric voice and sensibility. I recommend A Space Between to anyone who loves poetry, history, and the American immigrant saga.
–Michael L. Newell, author of Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge and Traveling without Compass or Map.

Reviews of A Space Between

• By Peggy Rosenthal, at Tinderbox
• By MaryAnn L. Miller, at Ovanque Siamo
• By John Magliato, print copy Paterson Literary Review, issue #48
• By Truby Chviallo, print copy at Primo
• Reviews on Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, Amazon

Interview
At Primo magazine (scroll down)

Reading
Recording of reading from first half of A Space Between.

Author Statement:

Though I currently live beside oaks and apple orchards and vineyards in Sonoma County, California, for twenty-six years I taught abroad in international schools in six different countries, each place holding wonders. Amazing things await outside our doors when we look closely with a curious mind and heart. Listening and watching for the details of life that speak, I carry my camera and journal with me nearly everywhere. They’re a net that helps me gather in the moments that make the world. Writing brings me joy. It allows me to enter life more deeply and to understand it more fully. I hope the words I write touch people’s spirits and affirm their inner selves.

In this short film, The Writing Life, made by Adrian Juric, I speak more about the value of writing and my work and purpose as a writer.

To Find A River

What others have said about  To Find a River

Available now from Dancing Girl Press

The heart of Anna Citrino’s To Find a River beats with longing—how saturated it is! She takes us with her as she moves through inquiries of goddesses and God, of art, of nature, even of desire itself; yet nothing is postured here, nothing self-important. She’s very clear that this isn’t just about her, that it’s about all of us: “I live in an apartment building / with three million others,” she tells us; and, later, the changes begin: “Earth becomes flesh—the dune’s round hip-curved turn,” a magical line which brings immediately to mind John Muir’s: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” “Plants suckle on stone breasts,” she reminds us. “Even stones / can speak of water.” But also, “I want to break open the twilight in me.” “Desire fills the sky.” Citrino’s penetrating, lyrical investigation is a reminder that, at our core, we are desire, that we are “reaching to be named.” This collection shines; in the very best way, by example, she sheds light on us. I name her Star. -–Renée Ashley, author of Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life

“There’s a space inside me” says poet Anna Citrino and these poems launch us into its multi-generational exploration that extends from biological to cosmic, from heart to soul, from answers to deeper questions, from rock to water. Perhaps, praise alone for this luminous collection won’t convince you to read it, but if you pick up the book you’ll feel it soar of its own will, and you’ll consider yourself amply rewarded to have done so.
— Sarah Cortez, Poet, Essayist, President & Founder, Catholic Literary Arts

At first glance, Anna Citrino’s new chapbook could seem to revolve around the question: “What is it to be a woman.” However, her poems contain more universal themes from generosity and jealousy to humanities brilliance, such as in the poem: “At the Galleria Borghese, Bernini’s Vision:”  “…This isn’t a about perfection. /It’s about how dreams run across the earth/like gods. Once a man carved and turned them/ into life. To see them is to find a name for light. “ Through her luminous poems, Citrino’s work takes us through ancient stories like that of Sarah and Abraham, to personal ones about her mother, to universal ones about caves where our mutual ancestors came from, touching the hand of the creator. Her travels have captured small and magnificent moments of women being nurtures, like in “Dolmades” to the questions of fertility, or of her complex maternal relationship in the line, “…I am the small pebble in her palm.” To Find a River, is a jewel that takes us on a journey of the self, finding out who we are as we place our existence up against life’s complicated stories and open questions. ––Robin Lysne, Ph.D. Author, Artist and publisher of Blue Bone Books, and seven titles including; Ceremonies from the Heart, for Children, Adults and the Earth and Mosaic, New and Collected Poems. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.

In To Find a River, Anna Citrino offers tastes, sights, feelings, and fragrances harvested from a well-examined life. Here are poems of women viewed from diverse angles; portraits of relationships; statements—“we construct utopias for the self” or “not all things flat remain without dimension”—that are as enigmatic as koans. In these 16 poems, mothers, pagan goddesses, mythical beings, unborn children, and Biblical figures wander in a careful light, and address the reader from unexpected vantage points. You will want to be better acquainted with the strangers in these poems, and the questions Citrino poses, like “what does it mean to touch one’s dream and live?” will linger with you after you turn the final page. — Annie Stenzel, Author, The First Home Air After Absence“

Comments in response to Anna’s chapbook, Saudade:

Also available on Amazon

Anna Citrino’s poems are exquisitely beautiful! Her poems show us clearly the beauty, as well as the broken, on the dusty streets of Delhi and elsewhere around the world. Anna insists on looking, and not turning her gaze away, until the poem transforms her and our experience. Her poems fill us with longing for a world made whole again. –Georgia Heard

I have always wanted a literature that, to me, brings the world inside. Happily, the poetry of Anna Citrino does exactly that: her writing embodies the world in the best way, with concrete, tangible images we feel we can touch, hear, and see vividly. When she observes that “[t]he Portuguese created fado to hold the world’s longing,” I am enchanted to feel such waves of music rolling into my own existence. Her focus delves between fascination for the world and a deep responsibility to the world. For all of us who long for the world, this is a poetry that well provides. –Nicholas Samaras

“I want to write a poem / like a lightning bolt,” begins Anna Citrino‘s “The Poem I Want to Write.” No such ordinary—and dare I say benign—phenomenon as lightning could increase the impact of these subtle, penetrating poems. Lightning wishes it had the power of just one of Anna Citrino‘s images, or line breaks, or words. To read her work is to enter a world in which joy and sadness inhabit nearly every moment; to read her work is to become a citizen of this world. “We turn through the pages of time / and off we go each day to make our story, / paint our picture, lift our bricks, do our work,” she writes in “Seen and Heard.” With the poet Anna Citrino as our guide, off we go indeed. –Jean LeBlanc

I purchased Saudade because I’ve known Anna Citrino for thirty years; I loved the poetry because it’s exquisite. I read one poem each night for nineteen nights, savoring the poem like a fine port. At the end of each one, I felt as though I’d been taken on a journey and returned to the starting point with a fresh perspective. In “Into the Dark,” “We climb high up into the hills to peer through/the windows of a monastery, hoping to see/India’s highest mountain, Kachendzonga.” It’s a magical trek, even if “clouds surround us.” We may not see the mountain, but the possibility is there for us, unlike for the person whose “kaleidoscopic color” is “lost now/ to the gauze of blindness.” —Vinnie Hansen

…I read Anna Citrino’s book of poems, “Saudade”…What the poet does is write gorgeously, image upon image until she weaves a total sensory world, and you’re going along and then in the final lines, with the subtle turn, your heart sort of explodes, tears come, a sigh is extracted. I felt I had been not only to India or to her mother’s bedside, or her father’s, but inside a human heart. ––Lisa Lou

Books by Anna
Buoyant, Bellowing Ark Press, 2022
A Space Between, Bordighera Press, 2019

Chapbooks

To Find a River, Dancing Girl Press,  October 2019
Saudade, Finishing Line Press, June 2013

Literary Journals Anna’s work has appeared in

Adirondack Review
Autumn House Journal
Bellowing Ark
Black Poppy Review
Buffalo Bones
Canary
Calyx
Collages and Bricolages
Current
Earth’s Daughters
Evening Street Review, Winter 2022, Winter 2021, Autumn 2019, Autumn 2017
Fine Madness
Flyway
Indelible
International Journal of Wilderness
Iris Literary Journal
Juniper
Kalliope
La Piccioletta Barca
Last Stanza Poetry Journal Issue #16
Lilliput Review
Main Street Rag
Medicinal Purposes 
North Bay Poetics
Paterson Literary Review, issue 44, issue 46
Porter Gulch Review, Fall, 2021, p. 42 & 43
Poppy Road Review
Phren-z
Rockvale Review
San Diego Poetry Annual 2016
Ship of Fools
Spillway
So to Speak
Sojourners
Waterwheel Review
Writing in a Woman’s Voice

Other publications where Anna’s work has appeared

A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic, published June 6, 2021, University Professors Press

“Practicing Presence” (p.14) published in March 2019 in the Psychosynthesis Quarterly of the Association for the Advancement of Psychosynthesis.

Decisions, Decisions, the Dynamics of Choice, a Chrysalis Reader
Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, ed. Maureen Tolman Flannery
Safe to Chew, Wicwas Press
Chapter, “E-mail Publication Projects,” in Publishing With Students, Heinemann
various articles in the The International Educator

Free-lance writing for Six Red Marbles

Poetry Workshop Presenter

ACS, Hillingdon International School, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, for middle school students, grades 5-8.
Learning Choice Academy, La Mesa, and Chula Vista, CA
Pacific Ridge, Carlsbad, CA

Students’ comments about what they liked about the poetry workshop:

• Now when I want to write a poem I’ll listen to song and see what I can think of “personification,” and sensory details.
• Thinking about objects and if they were alive how they would feel. Also looking at other people’s perspectives.
• It was really useful to know that comparisons between two ideas or things can create many ideas for a poem.
• Looking at landscapes, and her talking about them helped. I could start writing my own ideas with her experience.
• She helped me to be more descriptive and deep in my poems.
• I liked the class when we learned about line breaks and how it sounds different if you put a word on a different line.
• I liked writing with inspiration in music.
• To really think deeply about the tiniest and biggest and most extraordinary things that you can write about, and really use the right words to express these images and feelings.