Shards: Fragments of Verses

Lorenzo Chiera

Lawrence gets you laughing then hits you with the truth.

Francis Ford Coppola

Ferlinghetti’s fiery translation of a little-known 14th-century Roman poet

Shards: Fragments of Verses

by Lorenzo Chiera

Translated from Italian by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera’s elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere (“City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse!”), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time.

In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: “We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some slave ship, not knowing night from day nor sight from sound, the eye and the ear and the nose confounding each other, not yet knowing which function each was to take up in the quivering dawn.”

Buy Shards: Fragments of Verses

Clothbound(published Sep, 08 2015)

ISBN
9780811224758
Price US
15.95
Price CN
18.95
Trim Size
4 x6
Page Count
64

Lawrence gets you laughing then hits you with the truth.

Francis Ford Coppola

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the herald of a new age in poetry. He’d learned to write poems in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined. That strength has turned out to be lasting.

The New York Times