Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by John Taylor. THE LITTLE BOOK OF PASSAGE is the story of the crossing of an inner fault line, a travel diary through the territories of the psyche: presences close to disappearing and dreamlike atmospheres act as a deforming mirror in regard to the gestures and happenstances of everyday life. Allusiveness and precision, density and evanescence, are juxtaposed and integrated in this continuous attempt to focus on and pronounce the world. As in a rite of passage, Franca Mancinelli, who lets herself be visited by shadows, recomposes the fragments of an open identity, which has never abandoned the origin.

The Little Book of Passage / Libretto di transito (English and Italian Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Mancinelli, Franca

Poetry

Bitter Oleander Pr

Poetry. Translated from the Italian by John Taylor, this book represents a collection of three previously untranslated (into English) works of the contemporary Italian poet Franca Mancinelli. The book is set in a bilingual Italian / English format and includes an extensive introduction on Ms. Mancinelli's work to date by the translator, John Taylor who informs us: "Alongside new work, this volume collects Franca Mancinelli's first two books, Mala kruna (2007) and Pasta madre (2013), which established her as a captivating new voice to which one listens attentively." Both books have received much critical attention in Italy as well as several prizes, including, for the former collection, the Aquila First Book Award as well as the Giuseppe Giusti Prize; and for the latter volume, the Alpi Apuane, the Carducci, and the Ceppo-Giovani Prizes. The poet, has subsequently published Libretto di transito (2018), a collection of prose poems, also available in translation from The Bitter Oleander Press as THE LITTLE BOOK OF PASSAGE. Mancinelli's work represents "poetic research by one of the most original authors on the Italian scene," the poet and critic Carmen Gallo has observed. "[She] combines an extraordinary stylistic lucidity with a visionary gaze that dialectically questions reality, without transfiguring or overturning it, and meditates on its constantly moving forms, on its hidden tensions."

At an Hour's Sleep from Here

The Bitter Oleander Press

All The Eyes I Have Opened

Black Square Editions

"When reading her poems, prose poems, narratives and personal essays, we are compelled to face up to the hypothesis that our true home is not, or not only, the here-and-now. And that our true form, or at least one of our true forms, is equally the previous one and the next one, both of which we can attempt to picture. This is why death, when it is invoked by Mancinelli, is not morbid, tragic, or dramatic. Non-being can be viewed as an "origin." So can non-hereness and non-nowness, that is, our prior and future "non-presence" in time and space as we know them. Personally, and not just as the translator of her clearsighted and deep-probing prose and poetry, I would like to say that Mancinelli's writings have helped me to open my own eyes to "the invisible" in a different way. Whatever intimidating darkness might have initially "inscribed" the words in her body, these texts often have a luminous and calming effect. "Staying close to the origin," she observes in "The Invisible as the Facing Page," "leaving room for the invisible as the facing page. Every time we hold a pen we must remember this ancient branch with which we wrote as children, when we were translating from the invisible (our own body, our presence, was a recent translation from the invisible)." Fiction. Poetry. Essays. Translation.

The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021

History & Criticism

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Books by Mancinelli, Franca