Description
Poetry. Selected, edited and translated from the Italian by Adria Bernardi. Bilingual edition. Terse, sharp, introspective, Francesca Pellegrino opens up a feminine perspective on the unspoken moments of modern life, mostly malign.
"Remarkable for a compression of form and the multiplicity of meanings... the poems of Francesca Pellegrino survey and inhabit a terrain that is contemporary Italy—its excesses and its silences, as well as the internal and external pressures, particularly those upon women, of those who live internal lives while actively navigating an external, contemporary world. Each collection reflects... a wider cultural crisis; on one level we can read these poems as externalized versions of today's headlines—the economic and financial crises of Italy and the corruption of its institutions."—Adria Bernardi, from the Translator's Note
"Direct, ironic, ferocious; possessing the terse and flexible musculature of those who practice jiu jitsu."—Alfredo de Palchi
"If you look at each single word, you'll find a flinch in it, a sudden nervous twitch that makes it new and gives it a forcefulness all its own."—Gianmario Lucini
"Francesca Pellegrino's poetry gives voice to the things great-and-small that, even in absentia, delineate existence and its not-always luminous outlines."—Teresa Ferri
Author Bio
Francesca Pellegrino was born in Taranto, where she currently lives. Her works include a chapbook, L'Enunciato / Enunciation (Libraria Padovana Editrice), published in the series Donne in poesia in 2008, Dimentico sempre di dare l'acqua ai sogni / I Always Forget to Water the Dreams (Kimerik, 2009) and Niente di personale / Nothing Personal (Samiszdat 2009). Chernobylove – II giorno dopo il vent appeared in 2010 (Kimerik). Selections from these four titles are included in the present Chelsea collection. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines, including La Clessidra (Joker Editore) and La Mosca di Milano (La Vita Felice); translations of her poems by Emanuele di Pasquale have appeared in Journal of Italian Translation and Gradiva. In 2011, she organized a poetry exhibition, Sezioni, as well as a multimedia exhibition, Naturamorta live, in Grottaglie, Taranto. She is a coordinator of the literary magazine LibrAria.
Translator Adria Bernardi received the 2007 Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award of the American Academy of Poets for Small Talk, a translation of poetry written in the romagnole dialect by the Italian poet Raffaello Baldini. She has also translated Siren's Song, prose and poetry of Rinaldo Caddeo; Adventures in Africa, a work of nonfiction by Gianni Celati; and the poetry of Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra in the collection Abandoned Places. She is the author of the novels Openwork (Southern Methodist University Press, 2007) and The Day Laid on the Altar (University Press of New England, 1999), which was awarded the Bakeless Fiction Prize, and a collection of short stories, In the Gathering Woods, (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). She is also the author of an oral history, Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois
Author City: TARANTO ITA