The Laundress Catches Her Breath: Notable Voices

This powerful collection of poetry features a chain-smoking, working-class Italian American woman struggling to support herself and find meaningful work in a depressed mill town. She endures the indignity of a low-paid job that she can’t afford to leave. The poems follow her tumultuous relationship with her father, a retired mill worker, her love for her educated uncle dying of cancer, and her escape from this soiled life through her ritual of doing laundry.