Fig Season, Poems by Joan E. Bauer

In Fig Season, the poet Joan E. Bauer explores what it has meant to her to be Italian-American. She mingles stories about her own quirky family with portraits of Fellini, Frank Zappa, Diane di Prima, Pasolini, Enrico Fermi, Anna Magnani, John Fante, Elsa Schiaparelli, and more. In writing about history, culture, and family, Bauer also shares what, over time, she has learned about love and vanity, courage and forgiveness.

Sample Poems by Joan E. Bauer

“Joan E. Bauer’s book, Fig Season, is brilliant, fascinating, intriguing. She manages to re-create and bring alive famous film directors, actors, dictators, fashion designers, and intersperse the story of their lives with small details from her own life. I love this book and I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down once you start reading it. What a treasure!”—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, author of When the Stars Were Still Visible and The Place We Call Home

“As one who embraces her Southern Italian heritage, I say con molto piacere that Joan Bauer has claimed hers. In Fig Season, she journeys readers to mother country, to art, history, and culture, to her beloved Sicilian mother. Bauer delights in succulent word and image, in rhythm and narrative, drenched in the juices of an oozing fig—plump, ripe, in season.”—Paola Corso, author of Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps and The Laundress Catches Her Breath

“Joan E. Bauer is not so much interpreter as excavator and inquisitor of historical facts and events. Her poems pull back the curtain on the anomalies hidden, yet profligate, in the quotidian. A child of both the physical and dream state, California, Bauer demonstrates an uncanny affinity for unearthing cinematic arcana and little known biographical details belonging to the cultural icons of our time. As such, Fig Season is a book of poetry like no other.”—Celeste Gainey, author of the GAFFER.

“In Fig Season Joan E. Bauer draws on a deep interest in film, and in people. In poems that are marvels of selection, you’ll encounter a panoply of Italians and Italian-Americans—especially Sicilians—Frank Capra, Enrico Fermi, Sophia Loren… Obviously a film buff, Bauer braids classic films with events in her own life. Never tell your troubles outside the family, Mother says. And Bauer doesn’t and does—she mentions her father’s blondes, his twenty years ‘working out of town’ and his ‘other family,’ but with insouciance. You’ll remember the piquant details she serves up about these actors, directors, scientists, politicians, and her own experiences. The key is the quotation she gives from Fellini, ‘Even if I set out to make a film about a filet of sole, it would be about me.’”—Arlene Weiner, author of Escape Velocity and City Bird

“I’ve learned so much from Joan’s historical poetry, always epic in scope while never missing the precise, heartbreaking detail. But the intelligent beauty of her often-masterful poems goes deeper than her impeccable technique, to the questioning, questing soul which animates all her work. What other mind has been this kind as well as this incisive? Here, she banquets on a feast of inspirations, interpretations and earned wisdoms about what it means to be Italian, that heritage of poets, anarchists and clowns, of women who had to be strong, and always with a thirst for life. Viva Joan. Viva Fig Season.”—Justin Vicari, author of In Search of Lost Joy and The Professional Weepers

Joan E. Bauer is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008) and The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021). For some years, she worked as an English teacher and educational counselor. In 2007, she won the Earle Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International and in 2018, she was a finalist for the John Ciardi Poetry Prize from BkMk Press. She divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-hosts and curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

ISBN-13: 978-1625494368, 124 pages, $20, softcover

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Also by Joan E. Bauer:

The Camera Artist