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English
New York Review Books
05 December 2023
A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master's poetry in English, gathered together for the first time.

A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master's poetry in English, gathered together for the first time.

Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy. She was

also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz

Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The

child of Carlo Rosselli, a significant anti-fascist intellectual who was

assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Amelia grew up in exile

and attended high school in Mamaroneck, New York. English poetry,

especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans,

became a prime reference for her own poetry, which combines modernist

experimentation with variations on more traditional forms.

The

elaborate, archaic, yet thoroughly modern poems, at once stumbling and

singing, that Rosselli composed in English and gathered under the title Sleep are a beautiful and illuminating part of her work. Six of the poems

were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s but have otherwise been

unavailable to English readers. They are published here for the first

time outside of Italy.
By:  
Introduction by:  
Imprint:   New York Review Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 177mm,  Width: 114mm,  Spine: 13mm
Weight:   164g
ISBN:   9781681377834
ISBN 10:   1681377837
Pages:   176
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was a poet, translator, musician, and musicologist, born in Paris to refugees from Italy. After World War II, she settled in Rome and emerged as one of the most powerful voices in postwar Italian literature. Her eight volumes of poetry probed the traumas of the 20th century-for Rosselli both personal and historical. Barry Schwabsky is the art critic for The Nation and regular contributor to Artforum, where he is also an editor. His most recent books include the poetry collection Trembling Hand Equilibrium and Heretics of Language, a collection of literary criticism. He lives in New York City.

Reviews for Sleep

“[Rosselli’s] language is dominated by a sort of mechanistic quality: an emulsion that takes form on its own, out of anybody’s control, the way one imagines it goes with the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumors, atomic blasts, which are under control only scientifically but not in their manifestations of stupendousness, in their now-objective occurrence. So that the magma—the stupendousness—is fixed in strophic forms that are as closed and absolute as they are arbitrary.... I can’t remember the last time I encountered anything of this kind so powerfully amorphous, so objectively superb.” —Pier Paolo Pasolini


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