Devozione: A Poetic Inquiry Into Some Italian American Women’s Devotion to St. Rita

Abstract

The devotion of saints in many Italian American households is as natural as breathing. One need not be particularly “religious” in the strict sense of the word. There is a mystical quality, especially among the women that I know and have known. In the following poems, I use poetic inquiry to show a vividness of experience that has an ineffable quality that would be more difficult to render in narrative and to “. . . use poetic representation as a means to evoke emotional response in readers and listeners in an effort to produce some shared experience between researcher, audience and participant.”