Grandma Moses Press is thrilled to announce the release of THUNDERSNOW by Joey Nicoletti. We just love Nicoletti’s ear. This is 146 pages of pure fantastic.

THUNDERSNOW by Joey Nicoletti ~ $14.00

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from page 65:

Sci-Fi Film Synopsis

A scientist keeps

an evil tycoon’s brain

alive

in the lab

and it slowly takes over

his mind.

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Joey Nicoletti is the author of two full-length and four chapbook poetry collections, most recently Reverse Graffiti (Bordighera, 2015) and Counterfeit Moon (NightBallet Press, 2016). The recipient of a Buffalo State Faculty Appreciation award for teaching, his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Aethlon, Voices in Italian Americana, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems From the Comic Books. A native of Astoria, Queens, Joey holds a BA from the University of Iowa, an MA from New Mexico State University, and earned his MFA in Poetry Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

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Praise for THUNDERSNOW:

Of all the things to love about Joey Nicoletti’s Thundersnow, I love his “Italian heart” most, its Whitman-esque empathy and inclusivity even when faced with a complicated—sometimes, troubling—family history. As the speaker tours us through the gritty and vibrant neighborhoods of Astoria, Queens, to his mother’s hometown in Orsogna, Italy, to a dorm room in New Mexico (and many other places!) we are in the hands of an observer whose eye doesn’t seem to miss a thing. Not the “gigantic (…) brain clouds” of a storm, or the “soopresata and Genoa Salami” of a long gone delicatessen, or a father’s train collecting hobby, or “a mother’s space in the mausoleum wall” that smells like “a stronger version/ of the glue my friend (…) used to sniff.” What beautiful, and deeply felt poems. And what an important story—an immigrant story, an American story—they tell.

—Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, author of the poetry collection A Lesson in Smallness.

Here is a poet unafraid of the prodigality of his own imagination; opening fresh themes, sealing them in new techniques as well as the classic, like the ekphrasis in poem “Trevi Fountain,” which comes to symbolize a marriage, a family beautiful always, but as time marches on, broken. Quietly enraged with humanity’s travails—“After my parents’ divorce, armadas of sickness invaded my mother’s head and heart;” Nicoletti’s verse can also be confessional, passionate, sardonic, self-mocking, resigned and reluctantly wistful: “What are you hoping for?” concludes “Auld Layng Syne.” Most significant about Thundersnow is how the poet’s emotive power and language refract our common ground and celebrate oneness even in the age of difference. The volume confirms Joey Nicoletti as a dynamic force in American poetry today.

—LaShonda Katrice Barnett, author of the novel Jam On The Vine.