Paterson Light and Shadow (
Serving House Books, 2017) tells stories in poetry and photography about Paterson, New Jersey, with poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and fine art photos by Mark Hillringhouse, who together have spent a lifetime growing up, living and working in and around one of America’s most important historic industrial cities.
In her signature style, Gillan combines sublime moments with gritty detail when she writes about growing up as a working class Italian immigrant as in the lines from the poem "In the Still Photograph, Paterson, New Jersey, Circa 1950"
The rough feel of a washcloth
and Lifebuoy soap against my face,
the stiff, starched feel of my blouse,
the streets of Paterson, old and cracked,
the houses leaning together
like crooked teeth
Hillringhouse’s award-winning black and white Paterson photographs accompany each poem and resonate with the mood and feeling of Gillan’s writing in crushed velvety blacks and grayscale tones that evoke the moods of this city’s past and its urban decay.
This collection contains over thirty poems and thirty photographs that together explore the hallowed precincts of this once great industrial city, envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as the birthplace of manufacturing in a new nation, a city now home to countless immigrants who still struggle to work and to build lives and survive.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book,
All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). She is the founder/executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also director of the Binghamton Center for Writers and the creative writing program, and professor of English at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published 22 books, including
What Blooms in Winter (NYQ Books, 2016);
The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Cat in the Sun Books, 2014);
Ancestors’ Song (Bordighera Press, 2013);
The Silence in an Empty House (NYQ Books, 2013);
Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica Editions, 2013);
The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books, 2012); and
What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies. Maria's website is
mariagillan.com
Mark Hillringhouse is a published poet, essayist, and photographer whose works have been widely exhibited in area galleries. His photography and writing have been published in
The American Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The New York Times, The New Jersey Monthly, The Paris Review, and in many other journals, books, anthologies and magazines. He was the founding editor of
The American Book Review, and a contributing editor for The New York Arts Journal. Thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and a three-time recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, he has won several awards for poetry and photography including the National Parks Calendar photography contest and the Soho Arthouse Gallery’s “Captured! A Moment in Time” exhibition. His film documentary with collaborator Kevin Carey on the life of local Salem poet Malcolm Miller, titled
Unburying Malcolm Miller, was released in 2017 and screened at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. He is a member of the English and Fine Arts Department at Passaic County Community College. He has also published
Between Frames, a collection of black and white photos and a collection of urban photos,
Paterson, that also documents the city. His photography website is
mhillringhouse.zenfolio.com
Praise for the Book
In
Paterson Light and Shadow, Maria Mazziotti Gillan writes her beloved city with transforming courage: In the city of dreams no one dies, she says, all the while we witness the lives of immigrants—her father who worked at the Royle Machine Shop and swam the Passaic River, the daily poverty and relentless spirit of the dreamers of Paterson. These fierce and lovely poems speak to the wonderful photographs of Mark Hillringhouse as she sings the road back to the 17th Street kitchen with its big black coal stove. No one writes with the heart and soul of Mazziotti Gillan—from the depths of loss to the still shimmering happiness.
— Jan Beatty
Paterson Light and Shadow is a fascinating collaboration between poet Maria Gillan and photographer Mark Hillringhouse. Maria Gillan’s poems evoke the warmth of a childhood in the home and neighborhood created by Italian immigrants. Outside in the WASP world at school, it was a colder place where all that made her life sweet at home made her ostracized and demeaned.These poems and photographs also show the transformation, typical of so many American cities, from bustling hub of manufacturing with a lively downtown to a shell marked by decay and unemployment. Gillan gives voice to a past generation of the city and current desolation.
— Marge Piercy
This partnership—the alliance of the two of them, Maria and Mark—is seamless and powerful. This is an amazing book.
— Gerald Stern
. Maria's official website is at 
The funds will be used to buy copies of two of the most influential guides to writing poetry – Steve Kowit’s 
.
(Bordighera Press) takes the reader on a journey, one in which she recognizes deep within herself “the voices of the women who came before,” their words blending together, forming, as she tells the reader, “the beat I move to.” This beat is very much a part of the narrative she weaves in her characteristic honest, intimate, humorous voice. This beat is true, hard working, strong; a beat that began in the villages on the mountaintops in San Mauro, Italy, and continues to the present day, illuminating the path for those that will follow.
, Maria Mazziotti Gillan comes to the limit of human experience, stares death in the face, and struggles to keep moving. These moments she faces and speaks of so clearly are unavoidable, and the long illness and death of her husband, Dennis, is her personal version of the fundamental struggle we all face.
(
, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), and Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, Italian Women in Black Dresses, and What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).