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New York Revisited is based on a poem by Joseph Tusiani, a poet whose family emigrated alongside my grandmother’s family from the same small town in Italy to the Bronx. He was not only a paesan, or someone from the same town, but his father was also my grandmother’s godfather, a role in Italian culture that mean that our families were inextricably linked.
My grandmother, Providenza Lombardi, had an interest in poetry from a young age, and she and Joseph Tusiani bonded over their shared love of Emily Dickinson and other poets. There are rumors in the family that their parents planned a marriage between them, a plan that disintegrated when Providenza met my grandfather, Robert Weiss.
My grandmother died just a few years after their marriage, in surgery at the age of 25. In writing and researching for this piece, I felt a close connection to her and her love for poetry, the connections between my family and the Tusianis, and the bridges between the boroughs, heaven and earth that Joseph Tusiani addresses in the poem.
- Will Healy, 2022
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