Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi received a bachelors degree from Wellesley College and worked as an attorney before becoming a high school English and (sometimes) law teacher. Liz lives with her husband Domenic in her hometown on the North Shore of Massachusetts. You can find Liz online at www.lizciampaleuzzi.com.
Reviews
Ciampa-Leuzzi is thoughtful, considerate, as subtle as a Vermeer
backgound, ("Woman Holding A Balance") the darkness illumines
the pearly highlights in the foreground. Trying to balance past
with present, the reader barely notices how the poems undulate,
rippling back and forth between an underlining need to weigh,
who we are, from, where we come from. The comparisons are relatable,
each poem, each portrait alive in stillness, recognition:
"…Grass blades nick our ankles
All of us, including you, watch a hole in the ground
Open up, deep and dark, beckoning, welcoming
We know you are not in that box
Even so, like puppets, we jerk through movement
Shells ourselves, our spirits reach high for you…"
The poet lets her readers in on the process of layering, through
precise language, to the final solidification that only compassion
can protect, the wet surface dries. The poem's landscape depicts
all the crevices, dry land, the person represented:
"…Your eyes like puppets.
No will of their own.
Today your head pops up as if
strung by marionette strings.
I roll my eyes
While Mother Nature Chuckles"
What is Left resonates. The varnish keeps the depictions from melting
back to their original state. Each poem creates a place for memory, for
the present to merge and endure:
"While silvery blue glimmerings
Reflect
radiate
and
Dabble the deep water."
~Irene Koronas, Poetry Editor, Wilderness House Literary Review
Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi shows you What is Left when she invites you to travel the veins of a family tree: personal, poignant, reaching to grow. With candid description Ciampa-Leuzzi reveals the many facets of a woman both driven and resolved to feel, to examine, and to forgive “through the wide eyes of the Novice/ While holding hands/ with the security of Experience.”
~Rosemarie S. Sprouls, More Possum than Turtle
In this candid book of poems, Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi writes from the heart and quickly develops an intimate relationship between reader and poet. We experience every sentiment from sorrow to joy, as in her moving and poignant poem “Angel” whose “light stretched through my skin” to “Flair” where the speaker revels in her own optimism yet reveals a certain complexity and vulnerability with the chilling line “how long could you wait before screaming?” A beautiful and reflective book of poems, What is Left as the title states, will indeed linger.
~Carol Lynn Grellas, Litany of Finger Prayers and Object of Desire
In What is Left, Liz Ciampa-Leuzzi writes of the pains and pleasures of daily life in poems that are at once convincingly specific and universally accessible. Whether she is paying tribute to the love and endurance of a grandmother, or recalling the shock of a traffic accident, or considering the smallest details of nature, she points her readers to the meaning that is already there, if only we have eyes to see. As she puts it in one of her most memorable lines, “Poetry illuminates our home.”
~Bill Coyle, The God of This World to His Prophet
Purchase What is Left here Big Table Publishing.
