Alfredo De Palchi

In this keen examination of Alfredo de Palchi’s lyrical oeuvre, Giorgio Linguaglossa refers to de Palchi as the missing link in Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. From page one of this study, de Palchi’s voice is in constant dialogue with the Italian poets of his time. Linguaglossa gives us a complete picture of the relationship between de Palchi’s asymptomatic creative paradigm and what was taking place around him. While the majority of de Palchi’s life was spent outside of Italy, he continued to engage with Italy in his poetry, in translating Italian poets into English and for close to fifty years as co-editor, with Sonia Raiziss, of Chelsea magazine, a biannual that published a significant number of translations of twentieth-century Italian poets. Through Chelsea magazine de Palchi also became a conduit, bringing Italian poetry to non-Italian-speaking poetry aficionados in the United States. It is especially his own verse, written outside the geocultural boundaries that we know as Italy, which makes this study by Giorgio Linguaglossa all the more important.

Written when Ms. Bortolani was fifteen years old, The Siege (L'assedio) is driven by a brazen, exuberant voice and a linguistic acrobatics not unlike that of the most celebrated European teen prodigy poet--Arthur Rimbaud. Phantasmagorical and surreal, the poems move us through the chameleon-shadings of lust and love. Ljuba Merlina Bortolani was born in Bologna in November 1980. She is the author of three poetic sequences. She is a student at the University of Bologna. Michael Palma is a world-renown, prize-winning translator of Italian poetry. His terza-rima translation of Dante's Inferno will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2002.

Here de Palchi defies the idea of evolutionary progress, asserting that violence levels all creatures and brings them back to their primeval state. The cycle of poems presents a view of history turned upside down: history does not instruct, does not help, but only repeats the great struggle, pitting human beings against other humans beings, human beings against animals, animals against other animals. --Xenos Books. De Palchi is both tough and imaginative. He is absolutely uncompromising, and his poems are painful and exalting to read. One does not come away from his stark and terrible and hilarious work untouched. --James Dickey.

Poetry. Fiction. Translated by John Taylor. Alfredo de Palchi, in his 93rd year, has produced another stunning book after the cosmic obliteration of NIHIL (Xenos Books, 2017). As in that book, THE AESTHETICS OF EQUILIBRIUM leaps from a realistic setting into a fantastic panorama, this time revealed in sixty-four prose poems arranged in four sections. "The Fall" presents the author losing his balance, falling backward on the sidewalk, breaking his hip and feeling his "animal heart" and "porcine valves" respond to a life threat. "Destination Apocalypse" throws the reader back into the lush forests of Africa after the reptilian extinctions of the Jurassic, where mammals originate and a vicious herbivore-carnivore emerges. From primitive Ardipithecus to sophisticated Homo sapiens, prehistoric man passes in review, killing all the other creatures and raping the Earth. In "The Genesis of My Death," the story of this new species and his assault on feline forms splits the consciousness of the author into narrator and lion point of view. All themes, including medical and religious, converge in the last section, "The Anthropoid," which damns the anomaly for his pretense of divinity and his lust for blood.

As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.