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.”
Franca Mancinelli
FRANCA MANCINELLI was born in Fano, Italy and is the author of four books of poetry: Mala kruna (Manni 2007), Pasta madre (Nino Aragno 2013), Libretto di transito (Amos Editions 2018), and Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos 2020). Mala kruna and Pasta madre have both won several awards in Italy. Translations of Mancinelli's work have appeared in foreign journals and anthologies. A collection of her selected prose, The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose (2008-2021) (The Bitter Oleander Press 2022), was translated from the Italian by John Taylor.
