Cultural activist, teacher and editor Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of the leaders of the multicultural turn in North American poetry. This volume of essays is the first to critically examine the poetry of this important writer and editor. In a personal yet critical essay, daughter Jennifer Gillan exhumes the role of kin and kinship networks in her mother's poetry. Tony Vallone explicitly examines the Italian- Americanness of Gillan's prosody and childhood, while Joe Weil attempts to place Gillan's work in relation to a number of schools of American poetics, political- ideologies, and autobiography. Rachel Guido DeVries articulates the Italian-American feminist ingredients of Gillan's poems, and editor Sean Thomas Dougherty reads her work through contemporary theories of Whiteness, class formation and resistance.