Pat MottolaWelcome to my website!
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald There is nothing more interesting than the human race; and there is nothing more challenging than the world we live in. I write about people. I am often in contact, through my work, with those who have no voice. Sometimes it is the Afghan woman who is forbidden to get an education; sometimes it is the lonely senior citizen with so much to say and no one to listen; or the college student who is trying to make sense of their world; and sometimes it is the prison inmate who has finally learned to "unlock an irreparable heart" and, through poetry, realize freedom emotionally if not physically. One thing they all have in common is that they want connection; a human touch; human understanding. They want someone to hear them, because they have something to say. In my poems I give voice to people whose voices have been silenced; I want my poems to speak many languages, not just my own. What I love most is hearing someone interpret a poem I've written in new ways – understood through their own experiences. I write for the sheer joy and passion of it. Writing opens doors. "Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment." –Carl Sandburg "A poem is an anonymous gift to an anonymous recipient; and when you're finished with it, it doesn't belong to you anymore, it belongs to someone else." –Karl Shapiro, in a letter to Leo Connellan |
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PublicationsA Town Like That
A Town Like That by Pat Mottola In a time when “I see you” has become a cliché, let it be known that Pat Mottola sees into, under, around, and beyond people. There’s Annie who “plants/herself near the bottle return/like a native flower”; and Mack who “counts the bricks in the sidewalk/like Gretel’s breadcrumbs.” Whether her subject is the high school hottie turned addict, the vet whose PTSD mirrors her explosive father’s, or herself who has always “wanted,” her imagination makes you wonder how you yourself might be re-visioned. Her insight and killer last lines produce some of the most surprising poems you’ll ever find. –Pegi Deitz Shea, two-time winner of the Connecticut Book Award “I want to be a stranger in a town like that,” the line that opens this accomplished collection of poems by Pat Mottola, establishes the crucial distance that underlies these poems, relying as so many do on the eye of a small town spectator who, keeping her distance, gives us those who are overlooked, misfit, homeless, long gone, or just plain ordinary: everyone has a story, but the “true story” is a glancing blow, a swift appraisal, a guess. This distanced eye makes wit and satire possible; in poems of estranged relationship, the distancing increases the sense of estrangement and allows for a wicked humor. For ekphrastic poems, Mottola chooses Edward Hopper, Salvador Dali. Despite distancing, in the best of these poems, Mottola is able to sow seeds of compassion and acceptance. –Margaret Gibson, Connecticut State Poet Laureate Emerita “This glorious collection of poems reflect the imagined lives of people in timeless small town America. Mottola is a skilled writer, also an astute observer of human behavior and everyday life. These nuanced portraits will likely strike a resonant chord for most readers. I particularly admire her clear gaze and compassion for the marginalized: the addicted, the homeless and mentally ill, oftentimes overlooked or ignored in society.” –Irene Sherlock, psychotherapist, LMFT, LADC, author of Equinox You can purchase this book on Amazon follow this link: A Town Like This After Hours
Like the bar siren of the opening poem, this sweeping collection lures the reader in with trailblazing wit, wisdom, and on-the-ledge characters who tell it like it is. Particularly affecting are meditative poems about eccentrics doing what it takes to feel alive or approaching death with acceptance and humor. In the “Living Will,” an aggrieved woman dons a red dress and sashays to a nursing home to "try to revive the dead/living there.” Pat Mottola’s soaring elegies resurrect the voices of the oppressed––from Billie Holiday to Eve. Indeed, the book draws power from the motley of urgent stories it unearths—from slaves to celebrities to the poet's grandfather—in lines accessible and enlightening at every turn. In "The Old Couple," a loving husband tends his garden knowing his forgetful wife “will not bloom/again.” These slice-of-life narratives bear the heft and depth of novels chiseled down to poems that mirror who we are.
––Rayon Lennon, winner of the 2017 Rattle Poetry Prize; and author of Barrel Children Click Here for more and to order Under the Red Dress 
As if guided by William Matthew’s “Love needs to be set alight again and again,” Pat Mottola’s physical and memorable poems cause us to remember people who might otherwise be forgotten. By describing women who wear red fish net stockings and men who buy them drinks, she reclaims ordinary lives by showing how people are all looking for some form of human contact. Particularly moving are poems about her mother who never “caught up to Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan” and her father who fought in WWII and “could not escape the stench of Auschwitz.” Throughout Under the Red Dress, Mottola’s love of her subjects darts in and out, slippery as the fish caught by her fishmonger, a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Pat Mottola’s poems will help keep the human fire alive as long as there is breath to sustain it because of her hard won knowledge that what will endure is the human heart and that love’s power can redeem even those returning from war in jungles and labeled “damaged goods.” ~Vivian Shipley, author of The Poet and Perennial read more
You can purchase this book on Amazon follow this link: Under the Red Dress . |