"Born of "Roman blood and forged in Celtic fire," Everything Is Something Else is poetry as memoir as it seeks to explore key aspects of identity: the Italia, the Irish, and the Queer. This passionate and provocative collection spans 30 years and is a selection of new, unpublished, and previously published poems from the author's acclaimed 2009 chapbook, Supplications.
The poet is a stor-teller, no doubt, with an impeccable ability to weave lyrical recollections with bold -and at times- cutting images. The book is divided into three sections -Irish, Italian, and Queer but memory is the connective tissue through this sprawling collection that reveals much about our human need for story-telling and self-reflection as much as our burning desire spiritually, intellectually, sexually, and emotionally for connection.
D'Alessandro pays tribute to a variety of influences and forces in his life and poets he admires: "There Is Time Here" is a stirring nod to Jamaal May's "There Are Birds Here"; "Out Of Place" shares the title of the novel by Italian American and D'Alessandro's mento Joseph Papaleo; "The Sandbox, after the classic Edward Albee play -another of the D'Alessandro's mentors, is an ode to a dying parent; and the powerful "Mind Yerself" which is offered in thanks to the late Ciaran Carson and tells a woman's immigrant story while informing the reader that Mind Yerself is Irish for "I love you." Finally, the shortest poem in the collection. "Seeing Her Smile, Sometimes Never" gives a colorful nod to E. E. Cummings. As scholar and author, Pamela Rader wrote: "Franco D'Alessandro's poetry, instead of fracturing and alienating, unites and gathers both the personal and the collective human experiences as unique but shared experiences of love, friendship, passion, and loss. In the immediacy of its expression, D'Alessandro's poetry articulates both the palpable urgency to live and the pensive potency to reflect on the past and on what has been... (He) seeks a correspondence, similar to that of French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, between the earthly realm of human experiences to the interpretive realms of language."
Italian-based, Irish writer/journalist Hugo McCafferty writes: "Franco D'Alessandro's poetry is the silver thread that weaves together the major events, places, people and themes of his life. His work has a sense of time and place, that the past is present within us and around us, through the deeply held memory of a mother's touch or the unending admiration of a father's square shoulders, we become that which we love. Ireland, Italy, and love are the themes that form the pillars of this work, the pantheon of a life lived with the passion of an Italian, the recklessness of an Irishman and the sensitivity of an artist. There is tenderness here despite having weathered the winter of life's harshness, there is not a hint of cynicism, but instead quiet ebullience that is a gift of hope to us all. To read and feel the poems in 'Everything is Something Else' is to walk the cobblestoned streets of Rome, or Galway or the sun-baked sidewalks of New York with him and to know that you too are home."
