Breakaway

Pop culture provides a way for making sense of the world and an abusive Italian-American father in Joey Nicoletti's poetic memoir

How does a child make sense of the world? Like countless others, a young Joey Nicoletti--"Joefish" to his abusive father, and his mother who finally had enough and left--took refuge in comic books, science fiction, movies, and pop music. Though derided by some as "low-brow," such media are modern manifestations of timeless archetypes,...
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Pop culture provides a way for making sense of the world and an abusive Italian-American father in Joey Nicoletti's poetic memoir

How does a child make sense of the world? Like countless others, a young Joey Nicoletti--"Joefish" to his abusive father, and his mother who finally had enough and left--took refuge in comic books, science fiction, movies, and pop music. Though derided by some as "low-brow," such media are modern manifestations of timeless archetypes, serving the same purpose that mythology has ever done. Thus BREAKAWAY, the origin story of the short-lived science fiction series Space: 1999 about a group of humans adrift on a moon unmoored from Earth, became a way of understanding his own family origin story, of his Italian ancestors coming to an alien land, making "the most out of what little they had, knowing that their survival depended on it." The poems here, along with the title prose meditation, are crowded with memories, many painful, redolent with the fragrance of his nonni's Wedding Soup and his father's Benson & Hedges cigarettes, recounting the way in which Nicoletti made the most of what he had, his own survival dependent on it, managing in the end to break the generational cycle of abuse. "Now that my hair is almost as gray / as my father's, I understand that / I don't have to bury my anguish / like a treasure chest or a body, as he did." Instead, he can tabulate in "My Rebirth" those many pop cultural touchpoints for expressing his thrill in life, as "once more, I praise / the same world / for spinning under / you and me."

Poetry. Family & Relationships.