Amelia Rosselli is one of the Italian poets of the last century who pushed herself most forcefully, most painfully and most imprudently beyond the limits destiny had set for her.
Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.
Translated by Roberta Antognini, Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodard
Amelia Rosselli is one of the Italian poets of the last century who pushed herself most forcefully, most painfully and most imprudently beyond the limits destiny had set for her.
—Elena Ferrante, The New York Times
What Rosselli expresses in these texts – so skillfully transferred by Antagonini et al – is an often-wrenching cri de coeur situating a continuum of affectivity. Rosselli and her translators seem engaged in a “union/of two souls one tarantella,” and these English-language versions move across vistas of love and despair and hope and insanity, in a dance toward newer orders of weird reckoning.
—Dan Disney, Shearsman
A luxuriant, floral oasis at the margins of dominion.
