I Come from Immigrants

In Margaret Duda's vivid and transporting poems, we can smell the candles burning, coffee brewing, stuffed cabbage simmering. She embraces her Hungarian-American heritage with palpable love and appreciation, bolstered by a deep memory of precise details from the past. I was enraptured by her tender stories of the courageous ancestors who helped mold her into the mother, the grandmother, and the poet she would become, writing poems in the beautiful tradition of elegy entwined with celebration.

-Andrea Potos, author of Her Joy Becomes

Heartbreaking, heartwarming and inspirational, Margaret Duda's poetry collection I Come from Immigrants, is a three-generation epic historical romance adventure like Titanic, which Duda and her husband watched night after night as he fought cancer. A skillful storyteller, Duda brings her characters to life and makes us feel like they are part of our lives. In "Mourning Portrait," Duda writes: Looking like Bergman's characters, they grieve for the body in the coffin.

-Sharon Waller Knutson, author of The Vultures Are Circling

Margaret Duda, born in the U.S., has managed to let us enter her world of a Hungarian immigrant family. In the title poem, she sets the tone: I come from Hungarians who left almost everything behind / to insure their children had chances they only dreamt of, / as they boarded immigrant ships from Bremen to New York. Duda's stories make you laugh and cry. Motherless children, new Americans full of hope, courage and determination. Love that makes them strong. You will enjoy this journey of a life that had it all.

-Rose Mary Boehm, author of Saudade

Margaret Duda's collection shows us how narrative poetry can plumb the depths of joy, beauty, sorrow, and grief. It reads like a novella, each poem, a tiny gem of a chapter in her past or present life. I cried with Margaret as she recounted her mother's fraught passage to America. Most touching for me were Margaret's words in the poem, "Lone Survivor," where she lives for three. The ending poem "Only a Bed of Water Now," clarifies for all children of immigrants the connection the ocean makes between today's person in America and our Old World ancestors.

-Joan Leotta, author of Feathers on Stone