It Could Have Gone Another Way

Lynda La Rocca's voice rings clear here-the brave, wise voice of a survivor, as we long to be, of our childhoods. This is a past intimately and skillfully recalled in iconic details: that NYC and Jersey-girl treat, the famous black-and-white cookie, cocktails and candy dishes, summing up an East Coast American culture with a shiny surface over what will break your heart in a flash. This beautiful book generously tells all and risks much. Indeed, if not for the spirit and practice of this poet, It Could Have Gone Another Way. La Rocca is a poet who has learned to "breathe fire" on the page, in poems that sear, soar, roar, and shine.

-Judyth Hill, poet and author of the internationally acclaimed poem "Wage Peace"

The poems in It Could Have Gone Another Way take readers on a path of longing through a difficult childhood, threads that could have wound too tightly and broken-but they held. And yes, it could have gone another way, despite physical and inner pain and betrayal, including a father's "other" family and a mother who "wanted to love me." But Lynda La Rocca's high school English teacher, a mentor in many ways, reminded her "how every word, it matters." And in the title poem, the last in the collection, she concludes, "It's amazing . . . That I have survived. That I could save someone, myself . . ."

-Veronica Patterson, author of Swan, What Shores? and Sudden White Fan

Lynda La Rocca, in It Could Have Gone Another Way, is the expositor of memory, of coming of age, of those things bitter and those things sweet which the vault of memory reveals to us through hindsight, healing, and being human. These poems are the work of a poet whose honesty is on full display, treating her subjects with respect, kindness and sometimes with fire. La Rocca brings her readers into places from our collective past, where the personal and the universal intersect in ways that are only possible through poetry. Her voice is genuine, unique, accurate, honest, and most of all so very human.

-aaron a. abeyta, winner of The American Book Award