Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 100
- Language: English
- Date Published: July 10, 2026
- ISBN 978-1-962847-57-5
Praise
Hilary Sideris’s wonderful new book Kissing Ilaria Goodbye explores marriage, divorce, memory, and identity through poems brightly alive with humor, longing, and linguistic play. Moving between Brooklyn, Rome, and Greece, this sharp-eyed collection follows the speaker and her husband Vincenzo through arguments, cultural misunderstandings, television binges, medical anxieties, political absurdities, and moments of tenderness. Sideris blends multilingual wordplay with references ranging from Pinocchio and Mastroianni to TikTok, therapy, and online dating. These poems are punchy and profound, both funny and fiercely moving. Kissing Ilaria Goodbye is a terrific meditation on intimacy, self, and our roiling modern world. —Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Who Said (Copper Canyon)
Kissing Ilaria Goodbye is a swift kick to self-delusion as the speaker’s marriage crumbles. Prepositions get in the couple’s way and their car is an English-only zone. The speaker’s Texan mother maddens her Italian son-in-law whose own mother loved Mussolini and starved during the war. Despair sticks in the speaker’s throat like anchovy bones that “can’t be washed down” but she stays calm, signs papers with a banker’s pen, admits her daughter’s throuple “sounds like too much work” and grazes on dating sites. There is the neighbor “with benefits” and Romanian gemologist she studies like a bug under glass. There’s the self-conquest of bikini wax, tweezing and lubricant. There is brilliant irony and soaring, lyrical analysis. There is humility, biting humor, exquisitely sculpted lines, gesture and resolve. I want everyone to read this book. —Lynn McGee, author of Science Says Yes (Broadstone)
Excerpt
Flaco the Owl Is Dead
We both adored the freed Eurasian
eagle-owl with huge orange eyes,
whose name meant skinny in Spanish,
who peeked through high windows,
wowed West Side birders with his rat-
catching prowess, six-foot wingspan.
Vincenzo loved me, couldn’t stop
slamming doors, called me stronza—
asshole in English, literally turd.
And why was I so sensitive?
It’s my culture, he said. A vandal
cut the net, but were we wrong?
We cheered him on, a predator
born in captivity, learning to fly.
He lived an owl’s life for one year.
Last night he hit thick glass.
Like humans, birds collide
with what’s invisible to them.
Author
Hilary Sideris is the author of the poetry collections Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), Animals in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020), The Silent B (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Un Amore Veloce (Kelsay Books, 2019), The Inclination to Make Waves (Big Wonderful LLC, 2016) and Most Likely to Die (Poets Wear Prada, 2014). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a co-founder and curriculum developer for CUNY Start, a college preparatory program at CUNY, and a co-host of the Carmine Street Metrics reading series in NYC.
