Welcome to Tony Iovino’s world, ‘Land of Sidewalks and Lawns,’ and a poetry that is 100% representative of the American experience as he and so many others lived it. This is poetry that is in a narrow sense grounded in the experience of one man; but more broadly, there is palpable sense of place, identity and heritage — unique to the region — spread generously across these pages which makes for telling and memorable exposition.

Like nearly 50% of his neighbors in the region, Iovino is grandchild to and inheritor of the legacy of Southern and Eastern Europeans who stepped off a boat and onto the shores of America a couple of generations ago — a ‘legacy that haunts my DNA.’ He’s child to parents who walked out of the ethnic enclaves of old New York and into the Great American melting pot, pioneers who went east, across the duck farms and potato fields of Long Island. “I am a product of the explosion of the suburbs,” he writes, born under Eisenhower skies and raised in the kaleidoscopic ‘60s. And he’s a man who has unabashedly lived his adult life in the region, with all the family, community and professional implications which that implies.

Readers of this collection will find much, therefore, to reflect on and delight in, ‘straight from the horse’s mouth.’ Namely, the singular challenges and possibilities of living a life of continuity and fulfillment in America’s first suburbs – within driving distance of the lights of New York, a city which lured waves of European immigrants to America’s shores, raised their children and continues to ‘beckon dreamers … willing to risk it all and light their rockets with abandon.”