Italian Dinner Music, Poems by Alissa Sammarco

The poems of Alissa Sammarco’s Italian Dinner Music are bursting with joy and passion, sorrow and quiet. They encompass music the way music encompasses us.

Sample Poems by Alissa Sammarco

“Alissa Sammarco’s Italian Dinner Music fills the senses with images of food and family, hard times and joy, remembrance and the pain of remembrance. Evocative characters abound – Hatchet Face, grandparents and godmothers, whose stories Sammarco captures in exquisite detail from Porto di Palermo to Maywood – corks pop, bodies drop, and houses burn with the smell of garlic from the kitchen. Italian Dinner Music invites us in to hear the history of a family striving to stay ‘sewn up tight’ while walking through a ‘memory graveyard.’”—Thomas Strunk, author of Transfigurations

“In Italian Dinner Music, Alissa Sammarco scavenges and gleans from the past some seeds to be planted for a future we may never see. What is the future of Italian American literature? What is the future of American literature? Are we doomed to resuscitate and embalm some old story, half-truths and bluster?”—Nicholas Grosso, Editor, Bordighera Press, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, NYC

“Italian Dinner Music is not only a book of poems;— it is a chest of secrets and quiet conversations. It is the chronicle of an Italian-American family that happens to have a poet among them. Some of these poems read like letters; others, like confessions. It is the story of many men and women, of their separate and forever intertwined lives. This book is a journey through time, life, and intimate stories.”—Manuel Iris, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus

Alissa Sammarco is an Italian American writer and attorney.  Her journey has taken her from Upstate New York to Southern California and to the Carolinas before returning to Ohio.  Alissa’s poems paint pictures of the extraordinary that exists in ordinary everyday moments. In addition to her law practice and writing, Alissa curated art exhibits between 2012 and 2017.  In 2023, Alissa’s poems were featured with the art of her mother, Melissa Sammarco (dec. 2017), in two ekphrastic shows at Art Beyond Boundaries and Washington Park Art Gallery in Cincinnati.  Her book Moon Landing Day won the International Impact Book Award in 2025.  Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals including The Main Street Rag, Sheila-Na-Gig, Stone Canoe, Black Moon Magazine, Quiet Diamonds, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and elsewhere. She has published 5 books: The Waiting Room (Turning Point 2025), Cupcake Day (Turning Point 2024), Moon Landing Day (Finishing Line Press 2024),  I See Them Now (Turning Point 2024), and Beyond the Dawn (Turning Point 2023).