Susanne Antonetta

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Susanne Antonetta (born 1956, in Georgia), is an American poet and author. Susanne Antonetta is the pen name for Suzanne Paola, who is perhaps best known as the author of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (ISBN 1-58243-116-7). In 2001, Body Toxic received recognition as a 'Notable Book' from the New York Times, and for making Amazon.com's list of top ten memoirs that year. A portion of Body Toxic was published as an essay entitled "Elizabeth" that was declared a 'Notable Essay' for 1998 by Best American Essays. She has published several prize winning collections of poems, including Bardo, a Brittingham Prize winner, and the poetry books Petitioner, Glass, and most recently The Lives of The Saints. She currently resides in Washington with her husband and adopted son.

Paola was raised among the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the setting for Body Toxic (and the haunt of the Jersey Devil), in one of the most environmentally contaminated counties in the United States. Paola's memoir merges her personal and familial sagas with historical accounts, politics, and environmentalism. Body Toxic depicts an American family in the midst of what the author perceives as the wreckage of the American dream.

Paola writes about how the poisoned landscape of her New Jersey childhood devastated her body, causing cardiac arrhythmia, seizures, severe allergies, and sterility. She recounts the story of the Radium Girls, details aspects of the frequent nuclear and industrial waste debacles in New Jersey, and relates these events to her family and neighbors.

Paola's memoir disputes attribution of her afflictions to genetic vulnerability, random chance, or recreational drug use. Vignettes depicting colossal man-made environmental disasters are woven into her story, accenting the recurrent medical catastrophes she endured, including endometriosis, rampant thyroid tumors, a quadruplet pregnancy (sans fertility drugs) that ended in miscarriage, numerous growths on her liver and ovarian cysts that necessarily had to be removed, all embedded in a time line repeatedly punctuated by manic-depression. Ironically, the latter condition was treated with psychotropic drugs, some of which are derived from the very same dye chemicals dumped, sometimes recklessly, into the environment of southern New Jersey.

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