In black bird and a pear tree, Dr. Lucia Birnbaum invites us to shed old silencing skins to sashay onto lava-transformed and rose-infused dance floors reverberating with riff-gifts of prescient knowing and heart-full, insight-brimming, and transporting poetic prose, the great Strega Nonna--lover and godmother to us all--calls us here into concert with her namesakes from so many spirals ago. Emerging from the dark subterranean sea of simmering...