In What My Father Taught Me, Maria Giura writes richly and candidly about growing up Italian-American Catholic from her earliest days as the daughter of immigrant parents and a workaholic father to her coming of age and onward into adulthood where she works at reconciling the sensual and spiritual. Her poems are a celebration in the face of love and loss. They are at once intimate and universal, serious and light, and are grounded in the Brooklyn, New York that she cherished and called home: from her parents' pastry shoppe, to the view from the Belt Parkway, to the family living room "where [she] learned to pull out the microphone, even though it was always broken, and sing."