Description
Poetry. Bilingual Italian-English Edition. Elisa Biagini is known for her six books of poetry in Italy and for her prize-winning bilingual collection, The Guest in the Wood (Chelsea Editions, 2013). Her striving is to rediscover the reality in each moment, to capture the purity and pain of each experience, and to communicate these hidden things. Alicia Ostriker has said of her work: "In a language that is part dream, part memory, part barbed wire, part a mouth full of teeth and part an ordinary kitchen or bedroom, the poet lures us and snares us. If it were music, Biagini's poetics might be brass, might be the thread of a violin. If it were painting, the pigments would be dark reds and grays, layered, jagged, mazelike." In THE PLANT OF DREAMING, Biagini makes further explorations, and enters into a creative dialogue with Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson.
"By disrupting the paths of language, Elisa Biagini creates destinations that are only apparently domestic. Her poems often map cosmic dislocations. You may dive into water and come up in the palm of a hand wondering if you have drowned. Biagini pulls you inside of pain arising from angles festering in light and life. Like the title of one section, 'From a Crack,' dark material and some healing emanate from fissures and small openings."—Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Author Bio
Elisa Biagini, born in Florence, has lived, studied and taught in the United States. She earned her PhD at Rutgers University and is currently teaching at New York University- Florence. She has translated Louise Glück, Sharon Olds and other American poets into Italian for the anthology Nuovi Poeti Americani (Einaudi, 2006). Her own poetry, both in Italian and English, has appeared in numerous Italian and American journals, including Raritan and Agni. There are six collections of her poetry in Italy, including L'ospite / The Guest (Einaudi, 2004), Nel Bosco / Into the Wood (Einaudi, 2007) and Nell'osso / Into the Bone (Damocle, 2012). Selections from the first two collections were translated by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney and Eugene Ostashevsky to form the 2013 Chelsea Editions bilingual publication, The Guest in the Wood, which won the Best Translated Book Award for 2014. Her poetry has been translated into a dozen languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic and Chinese. She collaborates with musicians, artists and choreographers and participates in poetry workshops and festivals in Europe and places as far away as Hong Kong.
Author City: Florence ITA