Gina Ferrara is a professional human being whose poems are dictated by the whisperings of Orpheus himself. This astonishing book of poesy is a testament to the vanguard of her singular humanness; as well as a fierce memo to us, that life's greatest adventures come with a daunting price tag: Flesh and Blood.

Ethereal Avalanche

Literature & Fiction

Ferrara, Gina

Poetry

Lavender Ink

The poems in Gina Ferrara's AMBER PORCH LIGHT Light occupy equal spheres of beauty and danger. Each holds its share of compressed energy, woven with images and lyricism, examining both the ordinary and the extraordinary, revealing what is possible when luminosity arrives in bursts.

Amber Porch Light

CW Books

In Fitting the Sixth Finger Gina Ferrara enters the poem with the same tenderness we come to see in the work of Marc Chagall. Each poem here is built on an armature of faith, each poem a belief in miracle and mystery, each poem a devotional of color and line and the naming of things we might have thought unnameable. 
 —Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate 
 Gina Ferrara is an extravagantly talented poet, and Fitting the Sixth Finger contains one gem of a line after another. The book is a feast of imagination and music. Colorful, smart, and subtle, with delight and surprise tucked into every niche and under each lovely petal, Ferrara’s wild and original bouquet offers a fitting tribute to the genius of Chagall. 
 —Annie Finch 
 Gina Ferrara’s readers know her work as much for its engagement in political anguish as for its homage to the natural wonders of the Deep South. But this time her “dexterous muse” has brought us an unexpected panoply of color and sound, a sheer celebration of Chagall’s genius that is finally the poet’s own love song. Like so many of Chagall’s mysterious paintings, the poems in Fitting the Sixth Finger oscillate indiscriminately between memory and dream, images observed and those only imagined, as they draw us close with their quiet color and vivid music. From an “improvised genesis, in short, effortless breaths,” each poem beckons and enchants, stealing details from Chagall or dowsing us with Ferrara’s own set of figures in poems that shimmer and shine, “glinting with the sheen of a wish. —John Gery

Fitting the Sixth Finger

Kelsay Books

Poetry. "These poems are poised and self-contained, humming with an internal logic and an external music that soothes and disturbs by turns. They are dense and lush, yet offer the reader uncluttered clarity. Rich with a physicality through which the spirit is revealed, these poems feint from fruits and flowers to family history, including the poet's own in utero, never far from the music of New Orleans street names or the interior puzzles of language. Shades and scents abound, "a sustainable stain of memory," in these wary psalms to the healing properties of the physical world, as well as the uses and misuses of love." --Ralph Adamo

The Weight of the Ripened

Dos Madres Press

Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, "American Femicide": these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union. "Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, 'American Femicide': these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union, and our North American landscape (beautifully evoked), seems involved in their fates. Notice, for instance, how often the vaunted freedom of the road turns out to be something else for these passengers: women 'driven in the direction / of what always goes wrong.' Notice, also, the details, as Ferrara chooses her images with the fierce attention of an angelic detective--a bright blue van, a bible, a deck of cards spilled from an abandoned purse--so that an earned and grounded empathy propels the clear voice, along with the desire for justice. In these quick and vivid poems Ferrara makes of grief an illuminating fire, from which the poet speaks of and to the missing and dead women with exemplary, tenderly respectful, imagination, memory, and knowledge. I have so much admiration for this poet's courage--Ferrara has gone among the ghosts and faced the terror every woman in our violent homeland spends a significant portion of her life trying not to think about..." --Laura Mullen "Gina Ferrara writes with an uncanny attention to color and light, evoking depths of emotion from minute sensory details. This, her signature technique, is employed with chilling effectiveness in this collection of elegies to 52 murdered women, one for each of our United States, plus two more, as if the grief expressed here would overflow any national or political container. And yet it is a sobering chronicle of a distinctly American epidemic of violence against women. This is a stunning book, reverent, powerful, immensely sad."--Bill Lavender Poetry. Women's Studies.

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