Other Lives

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Though written during the past fifteen years, this collection spans over forty years in the poet's life, referencing a variety of cultural situations and emotional dimensions that carve a complex and uneven itinerary. From reflections on returning many times to his native town in Southern Italy, to political paradoxes that dot his intellectual growth in America, to thought-filled flights of the imagination, to existential questions about the motivations behind certain actions, the author constantly tempts the limit of his, and our, sensibility when confronted with a host of often inexplicable situations. The search through these "lives" calls for the employ of various registers and styles, from minimalism to a long prosaic line, while the lexicon accepts the colloquial and the refined. The collection slowly evolves toward a disenchanted horizon which requires the author often to retrieve mythological symbols. Finally, in the last section, he invents his own character to rehabilitate the civic poem through a blatantly political scouring of our most recent social reality