First winner of the new Blue Moon Poetry Chapbook Contest
“Whether portraying the hardscrabble poor living along the Mississippi River or staring as Guillaume Apollinaire stared into Le Seine in Paris, Travis Mossotti evokes the ghosts of his own working-class family. His urgent meditations upon three generations of Italian-American men torn apart by economic hardship and death transport us, in achingly beautiful detail, to the Meramec River and Missouri hills of a bygone era. In My Life as an Island, Mossotti sings of St. Louis, of a heritage the poet equates with “‘the crumbled red brick façade / of burned-out warehouses on the edge / of a river that is more American / than I can stand.’”
—Marcus Cafagña, author of The Broken World and Roman Fever
