Reading The Immigrants' New Camera: A Family Collection is like sitting down to a large Italian meal. Maryfrances Wagner's images are seasoned with the immediacy of Kansas City's Little Italy, the family kitchen, the table with its stories, tender, painful, and humorous. The poet's narratives simmer in the richness of the Italian-American experience. Yet, as the best poems do, Wagner's poetry connects the reader to the universal, but with a hint of fresh basil and chopped tomatoes.

Al Ortolani,
author of On the Chicopee Spur