The arsonist by Aldo Palazzeschi and translated by Nicholas Benson

This is poetry from Italy.

The arsonist by Aldo Palazzeschi translated by Nicholas Benson is published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions. This is a Book originally written in Italian. This was published in 2013.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780984528998E12.

The arsonist, by Aldo Palazzeschi and translated by Nicholas Benson from Italian, brings Italian-language poetry from Italy into English through arson, Futurist heat, and Aldo Palazzeschi’s comic-destructive modernist spark. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for fire, laughter, revolt, and the delight of a poem that knows destruction can be theatrical, not as a fixed lesson about Italy. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. The arsonist belongs in the translated poetry library because it adds a historically important Italian avant-garde energy to the library.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.