What I hope to accomplish in this book is to give writing prompts that will help you to get past all the outside influences that keep you from believing in yourself and in your ability to write. In order to write, you need to get rid of notions about language, poetic form, and esoteric subject matter — all the things that the poetry police have told you are essential if you are to write. I wanted to start from a different place, a place controlled by instinct rather than by intelligence. Revision, the shaping and honing of the poem, should come later, and, in revising, care always needs to be taken to retain the vitality and electricity of the poem. Anyone can learn to craft a capable poem, but it is the poems that retain that initial vitality that we remember; these are the poems that teach us how to be human.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic Country Community College, and Editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is the author of over a dozen works. Among her many honors, she received the 2008 American Book Award, and 2011 Barnes and Noble Writers For Writers Award. Other awards received by Gillan include the May Sarton Award, the Fearing Houghton Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and the American Literary Translators Association Award through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pietro di Donato award, and the John Fante award from the Sons of Italy in America. She lives in New Jersey.

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Praise for THE PLACE I CALL HOME: "The Place I Call Home by Maria Mazziotti Gillan contains some of the most honest poems about marriage and family a reader is likely ever to come across. The craft is there, the well chosen word or phrase, but the power of these poems comes also from the truth in them that is moving and rare."--Marge Piercy Praise for ALL THAT LIES BETWEEN US: "These poems are powerful in their honesty, their passion and their grief. They take us deep into the labyrinth of our humanity and -- in the face of loss and death -- show us the paradox of love in the center of our being."--Diane di Prima