Italian poet Franca Mancinelli has internalized the landscape she grew up in poetically to express some of her deepest emotions. Beginning from the tremors, earthquakes and mudslides of her life and landscape, the poet develops her riveting ars poetica. “I have often felt that I carry writing in my body,” she writes, “that I have been inscribed in the darkness. (…) We are the imprint of the time that has been, of the life that has passed through us. By writing we bring to light these signs that we contain, as they are, obscure and indecipherable to us. It is like leaning over a threshold that looks into the void. We are between the unknown and nothingness.”
Caroline Maldonado
CAROLINE MALDONADO is a poet and translator living in the UK. She has four books of poems translated from Italian published by Smokestack Books (2013-2022). Her own poems are widely published in print and online journals and in two publications, What they say in Avenale (Indigo Dreams 2014) and Faultlines (Vole Books 2022).
