Poets pay attention and, through their poetry, become who they are meant to be. Poetry is a medium that traverses gaps and covers distances. Language is often limiting, yet it is still employed to breach the distance memory creates. Poets are aware of the power to which language can be used to cover this distance, and good poets know how to harness that power. To Make a Bridge by Antonia Facciponte is one such example. To Make a Bridge explores the Italian immigrant diaspora through the poet’s recollections of fondly cooking with her Nonna, tearing down a shed and sitting on the couch with her Nonno. A collection of poems that explores human interaction and experience, Facciponte fills To Make a Bridge with detailed memories of neighbourhood, life, family, and tomatoes. Facciponte’s voice calls back to a specific Italian-Canadian spirit and community and creates an atmosphere of warm nostalgia alongside moments tinged with tragic notes. 

Facciponte structures the collection like an Italian opera. There is an Overture, two “scenes” entitled “L’Arte Della Famiglia” and “L’Arte Culinaria,” which are divided by the pleasingly placed Intermezzo; all of it is settled with the Finale. “L’Arte Della Famiglia” and “L’Arte Culinaria” act similarly to the recitative—a mode of singing in a traditional opera that drives the plot and is sung in a manner that mimics the inflections of everyday speech. Facciponte hopes that these poems can help create a language symphony and an accurate depiction of her family’s unique everydayness; these poems guide the memory into familiar territories: places of sugo, tomatoes, and every shape of pasta you can imagine.  

To Make a Bridge is also a recipe for connection, a house for ink and flour and vegetable-like moments of pure old-country nostalgia. These poems don’t speak; they sing harmonized memories of Nonna’s apron and the secrets of the perfect meatball. “L’Arte Della Famiglia,” the first portion, is forged on impressions of family and family connections. In poems like “Mouthful,” Facciponte reflects on ethnic identity and paints a rich aural picture of the world of Italian pronunciation. The poet escorts readers through the pronunciation of her name by vividly bouncing syllabic effects of “Fa,” “ch,” “cci,” and “pon.” It allows us into the world her bridge is trying to reach. 

Solely focused on quaint scenes of food, the second portion of the “opera” outlines just how essential food is to Facciponte and her family; it is the great equalizer, the foundation of connection. The section “L’Arte Culinaria” is filled with recipes, instructions, and creation. It is parallel to language as a flexible creation. For Facciponte, cooking and making pasta with her Nonna is an act of creation equal to putting ink to paper. In “Fresh Sauce,” the poet again dives into food and the creation of it, from the tomatoes to the dinner table. Facciponte turns “vegetable into ingredient” and “words into roads.” These things guide us. An everyday moment of preparing pasta becomes a road  in “Making Ravioli,” As Nonna and the poet dirty their hands with flour, a memory is created. Memory is again explored  in “Onions Freshly Plucked from the Garden.” The poet pays attention to the onion: “pick one onion / from the basket and scratch at flakey / skin I try to match his swift shucking.” A dialectal probe into the onion and how it is the entity of manifested memories; a moment in time lost forever, but by recollecting the “the silent chewing” and the “dirt from velvet leaves,” Facciponte uses food to mark creation on a larger scale, years later in the form of poems. Poetry takes work, time, care, and connection to create anything substantial, like an opera, and Facciponte takes this kind of care in To Make a Bridge. 

Objects also become an important way of navigating her memories. The poet describes her Nonno in “Sitting on the Couch with Nonno” and treats the couch as the anchor of memory; the couch triggers her fond exuberance: “He pets my head / with a warm hand, names me nourishment.” She analyzes the family cabinet jammed with heirlooms in “The Cabinet of Fame,” intimately remembering each “glossy, keyed safe, freezing” object in pained detail; her recollections transport her to the fragments of memory that “internal keepsakes as spectacles” help bind. Facciponte recognizes the importance of heirlooms as a larger symbol of warm nostalgia and the faint pangs of tragedy. In “Timeline,” she eulogizes an old rotted shed, “of lumber, collapses / onto itself, and the story / is shed to the dirt.” The shed is a representation of her Nonno and the ability language has to memorialize human interaction. These objects exist among many in her memories, and unlocking intense scenes of these items allows the readers more access to her environment. Exploring these objects is vital to Facciponte; they exist as tangible manifestations of human interaction. Memories are made on couches, in cabinets, and in old rotted sheds. They act as a way to explore personalities in hindsight. Facciponte’s material recollection is used as a means of shrinking the gap between time and generations, abstract notions. 

Language is a beautifully complex instrument that is not concrete in its usage; it is a flexible creation that, when used strikingly and wonderfully, can take people and readers across time, generations and the distance that these ideas represent both literally and metaphorically. Facciponte knows that “each word / a sonant bridge: a touch” and can reach through generations, time, and sound to traverse the gap these very things create and expand. To Make Bridge ebbs and flows with notes of joy and pain: like the loose structure of an opera, it has its moments of seriousness, humour, exuberance, and tragedy. It uses words to build a bridge that traverses the gap created by diaspora, generational divides, and physical distance. Her operatic symphony pulls on the threads of food, family, and memory retention. In Facciponte’s hands, language is power, poetry is food, and family is a bridge.