Endorsements

“Citrino’s Stories We Didn’t Tell lifts history up from the land and out of the history books to render it intimate and marvelously lyrical. Meticulously researched and packed with incidents and insights from the poet’s in-depth interviews, this book of poems is as immersive as a great novel and yet is first and foremost a poetic investigation presented in taut lines, breathtaking images that shimmer with both meaning and consequence, and a profluence that won’t let you stop reading. A remarkable reading experience. A brilliant literary accomplishment.”
—Renee Ashley, author of Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life.

“Anna Citrino’s astonishing new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, is the story of a family of poor homesteaders on the Great Plains that spans both world wars. The story is told through poems, arranged into chapters, that carry the reader along with as much narrative suspense and immersion as any traditional novel. The poems, spoken by family members, shimmer with the authenticity of living voices, allowing intimate access to the inner lives of the speakers as they try to make meaning of their lives amidst the many hardships they face, including unforgiving weather and equally unforgiving economic and social strictures, especially for women. So alive are these voices, it’s as if a time machine had dropped me into the pages of this book where I was able to see through the eyes of the characters and almost feel the blood coursing through their veins as they react to their own behaviors and thoughts and to the events unfolding in their daily lives. One of the characters says, ‘Most of us don’t know much about the truth of our own stories, much less questions of destiny.’ Through Adah, the central character, I bore witness to one woman’s struggle to step outside her seemingly pre-ordained life of deprivation and subservience. Despite the brutality of two events that occurred in her youth, she finds the strength to forge a life of some independence and even beauty, something she longed for since we first meet her at eight years old, marveling at the ‘Sun-warmed fields dotted with coneflowers. I left Stories We Didn’t Tell knowing a great deal more about my own story and believing that destiny is based in human rights, not in the supernatural.”
—Linda Hillringhouse, author of The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For

“This vivid novel-in-verse offers up a character for the ages. Adah faces more than her fair share of sorrows, but perseveres. Through personal and historical traumas, Adah is resilience personified. This is her story, but it is also more broadly a portrait of women making their way in a world set against them. Anna Citrino has created something truly special in Stories We Don't Tell. This epic tale of family and survival in the Great Plains is exceptional.”
—Erica Wright, author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned

“In Stories We Didn't Tell, poet Anna Citrino uses her own carefully researched family history to bring to life in verse the indomitable pioneering spirit of Adah Lyon's Nebraska and Wyoming family. Poetry liberates the storytelling because this collection of inhabited narrators share their stories on the page with an emotional heft that only a deft poet crafting lines in couplets, tercets, and quatrains can convey. These narrators move us along the twentieth century facing two world wars, the meaning of work, harsh natural elements and judgments, and the finding and exercising female agency. Citrino gives us a universal story, even if our own families did not participate in homesteading and the westward movement. This collection provides an album of voices we can hear and cherish.” —Barbara Krasner, author of Ethel's Song: Ethel Rosenberg's Life in Poems, co-winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, Grades 7–12

“In Stories We Didn’t Tell, Anna Citrino tells a story of her own family, and in so doing, tells the story of women’s struggle for equality, the story of America, and how things changed over the course of the 20th century. It’s written as a book, and one I’m sure you’ll keep reading straight through as I did. It's a story of determination and pluck and sorrow. I loved reading this book; I was drawn into the characters, the lives they lived, the difficulties they experienced, as well as the beauty they found in the ugliest moments of their lives. What a wonderful book!”
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, winner of the American Book Award

“Stories We Didn’t Tell is a compelling portrait of the individual, the family, and the human spirit. Citrino’s exquisitely crafted poems follow members of one family over nearly a century as they navigate experiences from the mundane to the tragic to the transcendent. For Citrino’s characters, actions such as washing or cooking become metaphors, ways for them to express the things they do not—or cannot—say to one another. To the readers, of course, her characters lay bare their inmost thoughts, grappling with questions of freedom, power, gender roles, nature, parenting, aging. The result is a work that is simultaneously gentle and piercing, a profoundly moving look at the extraordinary depths of ordinary people.”
—Ginny Kubitz Moyer, author of A Golden Life

“The cyclical nature of drought, crop failures, illness, starvation, and the hard labor of farming that never ends, counterbalanced by tenacity, love of family, and the solace of nature are pieced together like a quilt to tell the story that begins with a family settling on the Great Plains at the turn of the 20th century and ends in 1983. Spurred by the desire to start fresh by farming on an unforgiving land, Stories We Didn’t Tell lifts the veil and reveals the personal story of one family—a story that could have been lost forever if not for the poetry of Anna Citrino. She follows her family as they leave the plains, scatter across state lines, and try to build their own diverse lives. She gives voice to every member of her family that settled in Nebraska. Her use of dramatic monologues allows the reader to dive deeply into the psyche and lived experiences of her family members. The poems are filled with grace and skill in such a way that we are living each family member’s life and gaining an intimate understanding of their unforgettable hardships and joys. We all have stories our families will not tell, and we should follow in Citrino’s footsteps and excavate our stories. From reading these poems, I feel connected to her family and therefore, connected to the world. Citrino writes, ‘Stories help us understand ourselves and our place in the world. They connect us with others across time and place. In the world my parents grew up in, people didn’t talk about their inner lives, struggles, or histories. Hardships were simply part of life and required quiet acceptance.’ Our family stories are part of our history, and the struggles of our ancestors are imprinted on each of us. Stories We Didn’t Tell gifts us with an epic of an ordinary family and shares with us their extraordinary lives.”
—Kathleen Willard, author of The Next Noise Is Our Hearts and This Incendiary Season

“‘The past is never dead, it's not even past,’ wrote William Faulkner. In brilliant, profound, and lyrical poems, Citrino imagines and tells unspoken stories that plumb the soul and psyche of American settlers. A masterful book with sweeping scope and depth, Stories We Don't Tell expresses the courage, daring, and despair of Americans settling the West. The themes in this book are as relevant today as ever. I can't imagine a more wide-ranging history of western expansion with its undercurrents and repercussions. A novel-like book of poems—in a genre all its own—Stories We Don't Tell weaves together personal tales about people whose lives reflect the changing political and social landscape of the United States. At the book’s core is the question, ‘When and how do we become ourselves?’ Citrino explores all this in her beautiful, crisp, and spare style—stunning and often breathtaking, an important and powerful book that offers hope to the human spirit.”
—Susan G. Wooldridge—author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words

“I cannot recall a book of poetry that I would describe as a page-turner, but Anna Citrino’s Stories We Didn’t Tell is that very thing. This is a propulsive, captivating, and deeply researched work of brilliance, forged on the anvil of family and history. Divided into eleven chapters, augmented by an actual timeline of defining, historical milestones from 1883–1987, and set against a backdrop of wide-open prairie, endless sky, and the unimaginable hardships of ranching and farming life in Nebraska and Wyoming, Anna Citrino imagines a deeply American family of individuals who come to life as they speak to us in poems revealing their distinct personalities and interior lives. In this beautifully realized work of deftly textured language, Anna Citrino reminds us that to imagine a world beyond oneself has been one of the defining dreams upon which this country was built. Stories We Didn’t Tell is one for the ages.”
—Marion Paganello