Plunging into poet and literary historian Maria Borio’s Italian-language collection, Trasparenza (2019), one finds a riveting poetic study on the human gaze, dis/connections of touch, and visual intimacies of modernity. This collection was later brought to the Anglosphere as Transparencies (2022/2025) in Danielle Pieratti’s translation for World Poetry Books. In Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), the celebrated scholar Arnaldo Colasanti painted an intriguing portraiture of Trasparenza, describing a blend of the pure and the impure, like the digital screen, an evocation of the imagistic clarity of snow and glass, ether and windows. For Colasanti, Trasparenza reveals desire only for it to be erased and emptied. However, he cautions against reading Dr. Borio’s poetry merely as abstract and argues instead that her work presents a resistance against the concrete, existing in a space that is tactile yet fleeting, spiriting language away towards solitude, lyrical disunity, and oblivion.
In this conversation thoughtfully translated from the Italian into English by Danielle Pieratti, I spoke with Dr. Borio, currently in the central Italian city of Perugia, on her poetry collections, particularly Trasparenza (Transparencies), and the poets and critics that define the Italian lyric tradition.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut into the Anglosphere, Transparencies (trans. Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2022), saw a re-edition in May 2025. Could you tell us what your creative ethos was when writing the poems in Trasparenza (2019)?
Maria Borio (MB): The English translation of Trasparenza led to a book that is slightly different from the Italian original; in fact, we even reconsidered the order of the poems and their division into sections. I would say that it became a transcontinental collection or, if you could call it this, a form of transatlantic poetry. I believe that the book’s core—thinking about transparence in our time—resonated naturally in response to these changes. How can poetry represent certain issues pertaining to those who live in the Western part of the planet—a realm in the midst of redefinition? Transparence connotes our relationships, real and mediated, as well as our way of living, of constructing, of being in the world. Isn’t the language of algorithms also presented as transparent? And can’t we say the same about AI? With one provision: taking care to avoid reducing our relationships and actions to a surface-lacking substance, which has only instrumental ends. From Italian to English, therefore, the book’s interrogation of these problems intensified: how do we avoid making transparence a double game? How do we prevent ourselves from getting caught up in common sense, or slipping into hypocrisy (even when we need it to survive…), or forgetting what responsibility means—and not just responsibility to ourselves.
AMMD: Looking back at your first poetry collection, L’altro limite (2017), and then to Trasparenza, what would you say are the most notable shifts in your poetic vision and approach to writing?
MB: L’altro limite is an embryo of Trasparenza, and it was recently rereleased with the addition of some previously unpublished works in L’altro limiti con inediti. In the reorganization of the collection, I became aware of the difference between the biographical lyric of the early version and the epistemological inquiry of the final version, an evolution by which I gradually lost little pieces of myself. The title speaks to the problem of relationships. The “other” limit is always concrete. Literally, “the other” tends to reframe anthropological subjectivity in a relational sense, to rethink our way of being in the world as though we’re parts of a potentially unlimited system, to lose ourselves by accepting our lacks, or rather, our limits—the confines of our dimensions—with respect to all of that which might mean “other” and thus has a potentially infinite value. It’s an inverted and de-idealized infinity. We do not look at it; it is we who are looked at. I might add that it is a condition in which we are observed by both the human and the non-human, as though suspended within the dark light that pervades existence: a light that’s invisible but nevertheless nurtures our cells. Are you familiar with the physical phenomenon of the dark light that was generated after the Big Bang? Ultimately, we will never be autonomous, that is, we can never be truly self-sufficient, because we are fragile creatures; but we can be authentic if we accept that our essence—our thoughts, cells, and histories—is always responding to an “other.”
AMMD: Between your two poetry collections, which do you think a translator would find more demanding to render into another language (such as English)? What particular difficulties within that collection do you envision posing the greatest difficulty for a translator?
MB: I believe Danielle gave the original text a pragmatic physiognomy adapted to American English. English is a language to which the book lends itself, because poetry is dense with real images, shifting thoughts, and rhythm. Italian rhythm is obviously different from that of English, but it has a pronounced physiognomy: this aspect allowed the translator to hear it naturally and render it instinctively into its linguistic twin. Translation is, rhythmically, a second twin birth.
AMMD: For someone like me, who can only engage with your work through translation, it’s intriguing to observe how it has been received in the Italophone. In Poesie dell’Italia contemporanea (2023), Tommaso Di Dio suggests that your poetry moves beyond language and is somehow denied at the textual level. Arnaldo Colasanti, in his Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), remarks how Trasparenza steps away from the safety of imagery and memory, choosing instead the ecstatic and the challenging of its own limits: ‘What is an image if it is defined by the oblivion of its own form?’
MB: Interrogation is always a way to go “beyond,” to attach a meaning to something, whether positively or negatively. Does a poem that seeks to interrogate destabilize its reader? Does its reader want to be destabilized? No poem exhausts itself in the representation of certain experiences or situations. Just as in the phenomenon of communicating vessels, it activates an infinite trespassing: between life, who writes, and who reads. A trespassing, however, that travels on metaphorical frequencies. For this reason, it has a vocal capacity that is not taxonomically quantifiable like an obvious fact. It doesn’t provide a tangible structure, it doesn’t reassure us, but it protects us, because it activates what I would call the fundamental human resources. What those resources are is linked to psychology and to the individual readers of a text: imagination for some, memory for others … Poetry allows everyone their own conscious possibility. Furthermore, it gives each person time for an authentic breath, impossible to robotize. I think both of the collections you mentioned express these possibilities in different ways. Can the members of our species continue to coexist by applying the most basic “beyond”—by looking “inward?”
AMMD: Some time ago, you shared with poet and translator Nathalie Handal that collaborating with Danielle Pieratti on Transparencies was not just an act of translation, but also a defining moment that made you see your own craft in a new light: ‘Translating a metaphor from Italian into English is like putting the words between a concave and a convex mirror and observing the resonances between the two languages.’
MB: In my opinion, a work that is “between” two languages operates like a mirror: it takes shape fluidly as concave or convex, depending on the perspective from which we examine it and the language in which we read it. To translate is to sew the two reflections together. There will always be asymmetry, but it’s upon that very asymmetry that balance rests. Languages are in equilibrium with each other. At the beginnings of civilization, we all had a handful of syllables in common, and there was no need for equilibrium. As history advanced and the articulation of words and thoughts grew, we learned to flow, sway, and stand firm. What’s most interesting about this process is that, even if we think we control the flux at the moment we reach equilibrium, it’s actually the flux that encloses and supports us. Just as David Foster Wallace declared in “This is Water,” we move like fish in water—an element that’s invisible to us, but allows us to live.
In the same way, we think we understand the meanings of words and control them, but they often deceive us: organically, necessarily, a new reflection can come into sight, along with its uncertainties. These probabilities, which we often don’t see, sustain our capacity to think and feel, owing to a singularity that stems not from our ability to create images and thoughts from nothing, but from our ability to perceive ourselves in history, to find our balance among things. An ability that comes from learning to resist, every time. I’ve experienced something like this in my own translation practice. I recently worked with Jacob Blakesley on a selection of poems by Emily Dickinson, curated by Jorie Graham, that just came out in Italy: Cinquantacinque poesie. Dickinson’s syncopated rhythm creates a jolting, halting effect that can be mimicked in Italian by attending to the punctuation and to the concrete language that appears amidst Dickinson’s use of lyric and irony. Remaining faithful to the tenacity with which this intellectual, avant-garde, and long misunderstood woman interrogated the world and herself was both a challenge of balance and a lesson in epistemology. I think of a prism, the same with which Dickinson described the feeling of love: “The Love of Thee—a Prism be— Excelling Violet—”. Even the light that goes through a prism encounters resistance: a meeting between light waves and glass, like that between two languages or two poetries. And isn’t resistance, in some way or another, mutual?
AMMD: Your body of work as a literary historian and scholar dealt with multiplicities of subjects: from the anti-fascist poetics of Eugenio Montale to American postmodernists such as Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. You also wrote extensively on various Italian literary movements: the classicismo moderno, the prime fase montaliana, the Neoavanguardia, and the Neocrepuscolarismo. How did you balance your poetics with your philosophical and critical essays?
MB: When we consider the relationship between poetry and criticism, we usually describe the assonances or the dissonances between two different types of textuality. It’s quite common to look for correspondence between a particular author’s poetry and essayistic prose: to determine, that is, whether a poet’s prose can have characteristics synchronous with their poetry or if, in their essays, there are elements that demonstrate the influence of reasoning. It’s worth noting, however, that we mustn’t only consider the ways in which a comparison between poetry and prose might articulate an argument on the form of the essay. We must also consider how we define the value of writing as thought. Jürgen Habermas remarked, “Unlike Plato, Parmenides is not yet interested in the hierarchical structure of the world; he doesn’t develop a doctrine of ideas.” In pre-Socratic poems, ‘logos’ was considered inseparable from ‘mythos’; the causes of things were exposed in the context of their literary representation. The Western humanist tradition subsequently divided the realm of poetry from that of philosophical thought, based on the conviction that philosophy uses logical reasoning to define principles of truth that explain phenomena objectively, whereas poetry translates reality in a metaphoric dimension, without adhering to objective criteria, and can therefore only give a representation of appearances, speaking about reality in a fallacious way. Thus, just as Paul Valéry affirmed, “we place at opposite extremes the ideas of poetry and thought, especially abstract thought.” In any case, the separation between the discipline of philosophy and the writing of poetry did not lead to an interruption in the relationship between poetry and thought. Rather, it evidences the resilient continuity of Modern poetic language as a form of consciousness: not analytical and discursive, but intuitive and all-encompassing, rooted in thinking that’s antithetical to logic, what you could call metaphoric, because it doesn’t establish rational cause and effect relationships, but transforms reality through intuitive connections between images and the possibilities of language.
However, understanding poetry as a form of consciousness has not changed the divorce between poetry and philosophy that developed in the humanist tradition; the consciousness one can develop through poetry has always been considered more limited, or questionable, than that developed by philosophic reasoning. At the same time, however, Modernity has been characterized by a progressive crisis in the value of logical and abstract reflection, which has been losing its relevance as a hermeneutic tool with respect to science and mathematics. At present, we tend to “use the term and idea of ‘thought’ with reckless generosity and diffusion,” as Steiner says. We say thought when we want to indicate reflection that’s conscious and logical, but also when we need a word whose meaning is synthetic, approximate, and applicable to the standards we use to comprehend the multiple information strings of the media. Furthermore, in light of current opinion, it is difficult to continue to think of metaphoric thought, characterized by poetry, as one of the truly crucial resources of human intelligence. Thought thus fluctuates in a chaos of definitions; it has been trivialized, and we lose sight of its value: linking, in a positive or negative way, existence to meaning. Similarly, we refer to poetry without even taking into account that the language of this literary genre should generate, however partial it may be, a meaning. Given these considerations, reflecting on the relationship between poetry and criticism offers considerable factors for analyzing many of the features that underlie our valuation of thought in writing, in addition to the problem of how we trivialize thought.
These two aspects are fundamental for an author I have been working on recently, who appears on the margins of the Italian literary scene between the fifties and seventies: Cristina Campo (though I could also extend this to poets like Amelia Rosselli or Antonella Anedda). In particular, the valuation of thought in writing and the problem of trivialization of thought uniquely characterize her poetics with respect to the historic context in which she lived. For one, this poet interrogates the importance of metaphoric thought at a moment when science and technology assumed a primary role; from her point of view, poetry has an irreducible value, contradicting a cultural shift that increasingly designates artistic languages as less prestigious and effective as hermeneutic tools. Second, Campo opposes the trivialization of thought, embracing the idea that a change of perspective is needed in the way we understand its definition. According to Campo, who follows the example of the heterodox philosophers Simone Weil and María Zambrano, if the value of logical thought and abstraction established by the humanist tradition is in crisis, if these are considered less indispensable cognitive tools than the sciences and technology, then it may be appropriate to shift attention towards another posture of thought, one defined as negative, and to conceive of the poetry that expresses it not as creation, but—much like Anne Carson—as decreation.
AMMD: It must have been an honour to step into the shoes of Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini as poetry editor of Nuovi Argomenti. In Pasolini inattuale: Corpo, potere, tempo (2022), Giacomo Marramao cited your expertise on Pasolini’s formative years and early works. I’m curious: Have Pasolini and Moravia helped shaped your poetry and your scholarly work in literary history and criticism? Arnaldo Colasanti also suggests allusions to Rilke and Paul Celan in your works. Beyond these figures, which other Italian and European writers, scholars, and thinkers have significantly shaped your philosophy, writings, and ethos?
MB: I have directed the poetry section for a decade, and I tried to relate this journey in an interview that I did recently with Dacia Maraini, the editor-in-chief. You can read the interview in a volume titled Nuovi Argomenti 1953-1980: Critica, letteratura e società. In the interview, we reflected on how the history of Nuovi Argomenti can be summarized through the symbolic meaning of three dates: 1953, 2013, and 2023. The first is the year in which the magazine was founded by Alberto Carocci and Alberto Moravia. The second is its sixtieth anniversary in 2013. The third covers the most recent period. Between these dates, there’s a two-headed chronological arc. From 1953 to 2013, the magazine went through various editors, it expanded its interests from an Italian focus to a global culture, and it transformed its original ideological vocation into a political commitment distinct from where it started. This special physiognomy was reinforced from 2012 to 2023, years in which the magazine also expanded to the web.
Over time, Nuovi Argomenti never lessened its commitment to reflecting on contemporaneity through literature. The adjective “new” maintained the objectives with which the magazine was born: to publish literary content that adheres to what is happening and what defines us—“new” content for the way in which literature can “argue for” the present. I learned a lot from this meaning, especially regarding the radical transformation of what was once the engaged intellectual. Honestly, given the critical, social, and political function this role once had, this label no longer fits any of us. Having been born in the eighties, I can say that the only model that is still partially current is that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in terms of the degree to which he represented an example of authenticity (but also of parrhesia, to return to the reflections of Michel Foucault). I think, for example, of his Lettere luterane and his Corsair Writings. Authenticity is often referred to in the current debate: in various areas of culture, in reflections on ethics, in consumerism (the authenticity of a brand), in communications (social media). Authenticity seems to have been normalized and to have lost its value as an ideal: an ideal to which, in the past, both the purpose of individual existence and the sense of a collective horizon were attributed. Today, being authentic no longer requires effort, tension, or a firm conviction that only by pursuing this ideal can one arrive at a profound knowledge of the world and of the aspects that are fundamental to existence. Being authentic now seems to be a psychological desire, one more or less obvious: a fact of the contemporary existential condition. It is the normalized—trivialized—form of how we think we should be in intimate relationships as well as, more generally, in social interactions. Therefore, the impulse to reflect—which made us focus on the profound value of being authentic and on the meaning of an ideal—has transformed into an unreflective manifestation: from substance to appearance, tearing the sense of authenticity from its origin and its purpose, making it like a superficial expressive grammar of the person—and I refer here to the Latin etymology of persona, that is, a mask, a face that appears as we want it to appear. Why do I believe that the problem of authenticity is fundamental for writers of literature today? If most people claim to have a desire for authenticity, very few are able not only to look at it as an ideal, but also as a problem that deserves at least nihilistic attention.
Furthermore, those who try to reflect on the importance of being authentic are often influenced by a postmodern vision that has reduced authenticity to a scheme constructed from the shreds of a cognitive system of a still-naive human being, one who had succeeded in breaking down substantialism, breaking down cultural and spiritual archetypes and premodern social roles, but who had also deluded himself into re-establishing universal systems of thought and civilization on the basis of his own inner space, of his own authenticity. A human being capable of all this—the indisputable cultural revolution from which we all come—was therefore incapable of guiding his interior resources to build a cognitive and pragmatic project that defended the value of authenticity. From value it has transformed into habitus; it gives meaning to existence in an (unconscious) manner. Interestingly, just as we frequently question ourselves with doubts about authenticity, we do the same with regard to values. The question “what is authenticity?” could be metonymy for “what are values?”—and “do we need them?” Or is our cognition now directed—trained—to only consider logical-instrumental mechanisms for how personal relationships, work, society, etc. function?
Ironically, one could say that there is even a current “jargon of authenticity,” borrowing the well-known title of Theodor W. Adorno, and keeping in mind criticism of the rhetoric of authenticity connected to the Nazi-fascist totalitarian regime. Here are some key words of this jargon: reliability instead of trust/loyalty, efficiency instead of idea, presenting oneself or profiling oneself (think of recent theories on the media profiling of the self, which arose through analysis of social media use) instead of engaging in social interaction and dialogue. Our jargon is that of an unreflective exposure and aestheticization of ourselves: the self, as well as the “fundamentals” of life, crumble into a volatile, untimely, and insignificant patina. And beneath the self there is no longer even emptiness (which involves a tragic tension—think of the “internal difference – / Where the Meanings, are” that Dickinson spoke of when confronted with the abyss of death, of Rainer Maria Rilke’s relationship with emptiness, of the meaning of “abyss” for Giuseppe Ungaretti, of Eugenio Montale’s “link that won’t hold,” of T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men”): not emptiness, therefore, but nothingness. Democracies, Charles Taylor wrote at the beginning of the 1990s, have transformed into soft despotisms, which articulate a liberalism of neutrality: every self is important, as is every opinion, without hierarchies of value.
On the chessboard, the new powers move authentic envelopes of individual selves that conceal an authentic interior nothingness. Why then, from this perspective, is it important to consider poetry? Several controversies arise. First, poetry does not lead to any new paradigm that redeems authenticity as an ideal value. Second, it does not restore—literally—any enchantment to a disenchanted world, as Max Weber already described a century ago: it does not offer solutions to rediscover or invent the ability to transcend oneself, to intuit new universals, to design a horizon of meaning, that horizon required for a conscious individual existence in a healthy democracy. Third, it is precisely poetry, from Romanticism to today, that has progressively represented the birth, growth, and crisis of the meaning of authenticity through interior space (I am thinking of Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling). Therefore, we can say that poetry is the cradle of disenchantment. But it is also that expressive dimension in which the subject-object relationship of hermeneutic research (as I was saying earlier, that relationship that gave rise to authenticity as a value) remains authentic. What do I mean?
In poetry, authenticity cannot become normalized, nor can it decay into nullity. It would be rather naive to claim that lyric poetry, for example, has become standardized because it is characterized by the expression of the authentic feelings of an ego, or to claim that since the poetry of the past treated authenticity as a value out of the belief that only an authentic life was worth living, and since this is no longer the case, that authenticity has been liquidated tout court. The perspective is much more subtle: the language of poetry (that of our era, of course, which no longer follows a rhetorical taxonomy codified a priori) is intrinsically generated by an authentic way of questioning ourselves and the world, of expressing it and of expressing ourselves with a necessarily authentic consonance between content and form, what Valéry called sense and sound, no matter the stylistic differences. And the paradox is that, in the end, it is both the poets who support authenticity as an ideal and the detractors who are authentic in their hermeneutic posture, which shines through in poetic form.
Thus, the problem of authenticity does not concern poetic content, but rather the intensity with which poetry questions things. This intensity makes it possible for the person to never be depersonalized or depersonalizable, that is, for his or her complex and contradictory human truth to be denied or ignored. If the person who says I presents himself or herself with a mask, as estranged, alienated, or playing a part, inside him or her there may be a sense of emptiness, but there will never be an effective nothingness, a devastation of the human (that nothingness that someone who observes society with the parameters of sociological analysis can deduce from behaviors translated into phenomena, for example). Poetry gives a particular thickness or density to thinking—an emotional thinking—that relates to reality in a way that is neither theoretical nor systematic. That is, it seeks truth not in the form of hierarchies, laws, norms, or habitus, and not even as religious theorizing, but in an incandescent state of lived relationships. The thinking of poetry is intersubjective, to employ the terms of moral philosophy, and is an expression of Christological pathos, to use the terms of theology. For this reason, talking about authenticity and poetry today does not even correspond to a contrast between enchantment and disenchantment as if they were two objective systems (pre-modern vs. modern, naîve vs. critical, untimely vs. current). It is precisely thanks to the culture of authenticity that our interior space has been able to conceive the sense of enchantment and disenchantment and their dialectic.
AMMD: Are there any particular Italian poets or literary critics, modern or from antiquity, whose work you believe would significantly benefit from broader international recognition and increased translation? If so, who comes to mind?
MB: I’ll start with the classics: to understand the history of modern Italian lyric, an updated translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s “Songs” (Canti) would be necessary. Then making a leap of over a century, the work of Vittorio Sereni (Poesie) and that of Amelia Rosselli (L’opera poetica).
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on ‘The Italian Lyric’, for instance, which books and works would you wish to include as key texts? Can you name some poets, writers, and critics that you would be inclined to incorporating into this imaginary syllabus?
MB: If I had to make a choice that covers a long-term perspective, let’s say about a millennium of history, through five books of lyric poetry that I consider essential for a hypothetical course like what you’ve suggested, I would include: Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca, Canti by Giacomo Leopardi, Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale, The Human Implements by Vittorio Sereni and Hospital Series by Amelia Rosselli. If I were to limit this perspective to the twentieth century alone, which is extremely fertile and multi-faceted, I would expand my selection according to this chronological and generational order: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba, Antonia Pozzi, Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Fortini, Mario Luzi, Cristina Campo, Vittorio Sereni, Amelia Rosselli, Giovanni Giudici, Giorgio Caproni, Andrea Zanzotto, Giovanni Raboni, Franco Buffoni, Valerio Magrelli, Milo De Angelis, Antonella Anedda, and Mario Benedetti.
One could argue that this selection leaves a conspicuous space after Leopardi’s years, between the 1820s and 1830s and the early 1900s, but I would fill it with some interludes on Pascoli, D’Annunzio, and Gozzano. To return to the initial hypothesis, if I were asked to choose a few individual poems, I would be tempted to skip everything that precedes the Romantic age, because that period’s understanding of poetry belonged to a canon whose aesthetics and epistemology are not comparable to later lyric poems, and in my small anthology I would include: Leopardi’s The Infinite and the “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia” (from the “Songs”), Montale’s “Arsenio” (from Cuttlefish Bones) and “The Black Angel” (from Satura), Vittorio Sereni’s “On the Zenna Road Again” (from The Human Implements) and “A Holiday Place” (from Variable Stars), and Rosselli’s “All the world’s a widower…” (from War Variations) and “[The flowers come as gifts and then spread themselves out]” (from Document). Finally, keeping in mind the figure of the poet-critic, in addition to Leopardi’s Zibaldone, I would include essays by Eugenio Montale, Franco Fortini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cristina Campo, and Vittorio Sereni.
This interview was translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti.
Note: The Jürgen Habermas quote was translated into English by Danielle Pieratti, as no English version is available online. Paul Valéry’s quote was translated by Charles Guenther (The Kenyon Review, Spring 1954). Eugenio Montale’s “link that won’t hold” was translated by William Arrowsmith. Translations of Vittorio Sereni’s “On the Zenna Road Again” and “A Holiday Place” previously appeared in Peter Robinson and Marcus Perryman’s The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (2006). Amelia Rosselli’s “All the world’s a widower…” was translated by Jennifer Scappettone, and “[The flowers come as gifts and then spread themselves out]” by Beverly Allen.
Maria Borio (b. 1985) is the author of Trasparenza (Interlinea, 2019), L’altro limite (pordenonelegge-lietocolle, 2017), a Spanish translation of which was published in Argentina, and several chapbooks. Her latest book of nonfiction is Poetiche e persone. In 2024, her collaboration with Tom Schulz, Briefe aus der Roten Wueste / Lettere dal deserto rosso, translated by Pia-Elizabeth Leuschner and Paola Del Zoppo, was released in Germany by Gutleut Verlag. She is the editor and co-translator (with Jacob Blakesley) of Fifty-five Poems by Emily Dickinson, selected by Jorie Graham and published by Crocetti Editore this year. A selection of her works entitled “Vite unite” was included in Quaderno Italiano di poesia contemporanea XII (Marcos y Marcos, 2015). She holds a PhD in contemporary Italian literature and has written the monographs Satura: Da Montale alla lirica contemporanea (Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2013) and Poetiche e individui: La poesia italiana dal 1970 al 2000 (Marsilio, 2018). She has contributed to literary journals such as Allegoria, Moderna, Studi novecenteschi, Strumenti critici, among others. Having served as editor of Le parole e le cose, she is currently the poetry editor of Nuovi Argomenti and founder of poesiæuropa, an international summer school, and professor of contemporary Italian literature at the University of Perugia.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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