My Poems Won't Change the World: Selected Poems - Softcover

Cavalli, Patrizia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374534799 ISBN 13: 9780374534790

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

[ My Poems Won't Change the World: Selected Poems By ( Author ) Sep-2014 Paperback

About this title

Review

"A must-read for fans of contemporary poetry." --Diego Báez, Booklist

"How invigorating to have so much poetry by Patrizia Cavalli now available in English . . . The psychological insight informing these lines is stunning . . . Cavalli's love poetry, which formulates such complex psychological realities in limpid everyday language, often gives pause like this. Her verse is also sensual in refined ways . . . This generous representative selection deserves many thoughtful readers, for who has not herself or himself been sometimes lost in what Cavalli calls 'il buio dell'amore, ' 'the dark of love'?" --John Taylor, The Arts Fuse

"It may seem like an odd assemblage of voices, but Cavalli's lines sound seamless no matter who is doing the translating, and her keen wit carries through, unhindered by irony. In 'The Keeper, ' her dazzling poem sequence, an allegory on poetic craft and sexual love, she writes, 'it wasn't science, it was devotion.' She was referring to opening locked doors, but I took the phrase to be the essence of her poetry, one which transcends the rudimentary physics of gender, genre or language." --J. Mae Barizo, Hyperallergic

"I've known this fascinating woman for forty years. Look at her closely: it's as if you were seeing Sappho in the flesh. Her simple, mysterious words are the lyrics to a stormy, romantic opera whose plot we half-intuit but never fully understand. This is the phenomenology of desire." --Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty

"Like Emerson, Patrizia Cavalli says the same thing over and over, and each time it is amazingly fresh and surprising. The world does change, in the telling." --John Ashbery

"Reading Patrizia Cavalli is nothing short of ecstasy. She conjures the witty eroticism of Catullus, the purity of haiku. She articulates, with disarming precision, the instabilty, the absurdity, the exquisite anguish of love. Perhaps her poems can't change the world, but they have changed my life." --Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies

"From the first time I read Patrizia Cavalli's work--over 20 years ago--I was struck by how fresh and original her poems were. No one else could weave so much humanity in so few lines--alternately funny, savage, heartbreaking, and painfully wise. She earns the rarest compliment for a poet--she is irresistible." --Dana Gioia, author of Can Poetry Matter? and Pity the Beautiful

About the Author

Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi, Umbria, and now lives in Rome. She has published six collections of poetry: Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo; Il cielo (The Sky); Poesie 1974-1992 (Poems); L'io singolare proprio mio (The All Mine Singular I); Sempre aperto teatro (The Forever Open Theater); and Pigre divinità e pigra sorte (Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate). She has also published translations of Shakespeare and Molière. Gini Alhadeff published a memoir, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents. She is completing The Magic Horn, about a Swiss-American psychiatrist and her therapeutic sculpture garden at Bellevue Hospital.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0374534799
• ISBN 13: 9780374534790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Alhadeff Gini