The poems in The Flower of Youth depict the coming of age and into sexual difference of the great writer and film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The time of this story is World War II; the place is German-occupied northern Italy. Unlike his younger brother, Guido, who took up arms to fight in the resistance, Pasolini chose to help his mother set up a school for the boys, mostly sons of farmers, too young to fight or be conscripted. The situation ignited an internal war that nearly eclipsed the historical moment for the young Pasolini, a battle within between his desire for boys and his Catholic faith and culture.
The book is a kind of novel in verse including a prologue and epilogue that details di Michele's search for Pasolini, her pilgrimage to the place and research into the time that shaped him as a man and as an artist.

In Debriefing the Rose, di Michele calls forth a Sappho who will not be silenced - not by centuries, censorship, calumny, nor the burning of her books. This is poetry as time machine; it travels through years and langscape to create a place where Quebec's Lachine rapids run through ancient China, a place haunted by such figures as Wang Wei, Hart Crane, Rainier Maria Rilke, and Baudelaire.

Mary di Michele's writing has been described by critics as "both contemporary and timeless", as "fiercely intelligent", as "feminine, tough, ironic and unsentimental", and as the work of a "mind at the farthest reaches of itself". Drawing from nearly twenty years of published and unpublished work, Stranger in You is gathered primarily around the recurring themes of gender, language, and cultural identity. Di Michele believes with Kristeva that the self is a strange land of borders and otherness ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed. These poems are more than immigrant songs or nostalgia for the old world or mere wonder at the new; they are interrogations, revelations, of the stranger, of the uncanny, in us all.