Secret Rivers

Cavicchia knows that the true soul of any place resides not in its well-trod highways and main streets, but rather down the psychological back roads  traversed  only  by  locals,  though  well  known  to  everyone.  Like shorthand Sherwood Anderson, each of these compact poems maps the crossroads of boom and bust, of loyalty and betrayal, of prejudice and unfulfilled dreams that haunt virtually every small American town whose inhabitants are exploited as much by their own well-intentioned fears as any  outside  interests.  —   William  P.  Tandy,  editor/publisher  of Smile, Hon, You're in Baltimore!  

The residents in Secret Rivers navigate a community coming apart at the seams; we’re privy, poem by poem, to the thoughts that worry below the surface of ordinary encounters. With language both spare and intimate, Cavicchia explores isolation, resentment, polite existence, and occasional rivulets of hope, of people facing the inevitable advance by an unnamed company promising big payoff and no risk, in exchange for permission to rive what  lies  underneath  a  dying  town’s  yards  and  land.  “So  many decades  beyond  saving/  that  fear  begins  to  look  like  hope,”  we  read. These poems remind us to listen, to each other and ourselves. —Valerie Wallace, author of The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping