Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys — from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text — to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.
Mary Cappello is a poet, essayist, and critic, and the author of Night Bloom: An Italian-American Life. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.
PRAISE FOR AWKWARD: A DETOUR
“At once comforting and startling….Cappello's adventurous meditation…makes memory seem like something worth re-making, and not the casual currency it has become. It is a remarkable achievement.” — Adam Phillips, author of Going Sane
"With Awkward: A Detour, Mary Cappello becomes to my mind now the Kepler of human flesh and bone and of the soul of the worlds in which they move….Hers is a wonderful, suddenly essential book.” — Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows
"Mary Cappello['s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort…[is] revelatory indeed. — Mark Doty, author of Still Life with Oysters and Lemons
“An original, psychologically and culturally insightful book, a great pleasure to read.” — Josip Novakovich, author of Infidelities
“Daring in both content and form, Awkward is a wonderfully unpredictable riff on the human predicament.” — Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body
“A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book. — Sarah Waters, author of The Night Watch
13-digit ISBN: 978-1-934137-01-7
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