REVIEWS 189 Review Essay: “A pure act of love”: Poetic Views of New York Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills by Sara Fruner. New York: Bordighera Press, 2018. 94 pp. Review by Mariaconcetta Costantini G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara New York City: the metropolis par excellence. Its lights and shadows, its beauties and dangers, its many contradictions have been explored for centuries by its dwellers and visitors unable to resist its enduring fascination. Ubiquitous in American culture, representations of the City are found across different genres and media. Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920), Scorsese’s movie New York, New York (1977) and its unforgettable theme song interpreted by Liza Minnelli, TV shows like Friends and Sex and the City have contributed to glamorizing an urban space associated with fashion, desire, and emotion. If many have felt the lure of the City’s glittering surface, others have delved into the mysteries of its darkest recesses, as evidenced by a long tradition of horror movies and crime stories set in the New York underworld. Movies like West Side Story (1961) or Gangs of New York (2002) suggest that even the crudest details of the City’s history have exerted a force of attraction on writers, film directors, and other cultural producers. A recent contribution to this rich, variegated tradition is Sara Fruner’s new collection of poems. A translator and poet from Italy who moved to her “geographical soulmate” a few years ago, Fruner defines New York as “a storyteller nobody can silence.” In the “Artistic Statement” that closes her collection, she also explains that her poetic renderings draw on “the endless epics the city narrates every day,” which she has eagerly discovered and recorded in “a pure act of love.” Instead of conveying enticing urban pictures, however, she focuses on the contradictions of a space inhabited by a “diverse humanity” that experiences beauty together with “horror, disgust and trauma.” Sugar Hill in Harlem, where Fruner now lives, becomes the epitome of a city portrayed in its oxymoronic complexity. Used in the plural, the titular toponym suggests a combination of sweetness and bitterness that whets the appetites of readers craving poetic images with jarring contrasts. Admittedly inspired by her flâneries, the urban blend of pain and grace that Furner recreates in her verses is exactly what marks the distinction of Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills. As the author herself admits, instead of “chanting the patent beauty of breath-taking views,” her poems pivot around “archetypal recurrent images” that she turns into “deep-rooted obsessions” by observing the metropolitan reality around her. With her keen eye, Fruner Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ia/article-pdf/XXXVIII/2/189/1797912/189costantini.pdf by guest on 05 February 2023