Born and bred in NJ, Fred Misurella is a graduate of Montclair University. He has served as a Fullbright Scholar in Paris. In a voice that combines the all-encompassing embrace of a Whitman with the metaphysical wit of John Donne, Daniela Gioseffi offers a collection of 16 stories and a novella that, page after page, maps the gulf of loneliness and frustration between individuals whose souls aspire to flight while their bodies remain firmly planted on earth. Sex can be ripped from the blood as if the body were not a house of green moss, a vase of kindness, a space for greed set alight from the dark by the glow of hand on hand.
Time passes, the flesh decays while hopes take flight, even as the human spirit continues to desire.
The exotic enemy of the title is someone wanted, yet someone unattainable, primarily because of physical, social barriers that create barren spaces between us. Each has different ideas, memories, and images of her, so their reflections, gathered in the narrative, form a modern, cubistic portrait of a traditional mythic, as well as erotic, image. A seventy-two year old woman who works in a chocolate factory to support herself and her ailing sister earns more money in one day performing for a television commercial than she does in a month at the factory. But her earnings come at a price. Then she watches, puzzled and horrified to see the table of sumptuous food dumped into garbage bags uneaten.