ABOUT THIS BOOK

The first collection of Italian poet Jolanda Insana’s work to be published in English, featuring transgressive poems that evidence the power of language.

Jolanda Insana’s Slashing Sounds uses invectives, fragments, epigrams, and epigraphs to construct poems that pulse with the texture of an idiosyncratic Sicilian dialect. The poems in this collection are ferocious, irreverent, strange, snarky, and otherworldly. Insana’s commitment to contentiousness, her brutal and skeptical eye, and her preoccupation with language make Insana’s poetry particularly arresting. For Insana, there is no subject more worthy of our interest than language’s misfires and contradictory impulses—language being the ultimate arrow, forging a direction in the world and forcing a turn toward whatever reality appears in front of you.

The first book-length collection of Insana’s poetry published in English, Slashing Sounds is a powerful offering that addresses a lack of female Italian voices in Anglophone poetry publishing.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jolanda Insana (b. 1937, Messina, Italy; d. 2016, Rome) is the author of several volumes of poetry, beginning with Sciarra amara in 1977. In addition to writing poetry and teaching classics to high school students, Insana was also a prolific translator of Greek and Latin, including works by Sappho, Euripides, and Martial. Insana won the Viareggio Prize for poetry for La Stortura in 2002 and the Premio Pascoli Prize in 2009. Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep and the play MEDEA, an adaptation of the Euripides story. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

REVIEWS

“With the original publication of Slashing Sounds, Insana arrived as a new voice in modern Italian poetry, and, in Theis, the book has found an ideal reader and translator. Theis is beautifully attuned to the performative aspects of Insana’s verse—the push and pull of grammatical and affective moods, the propulsive prosody of disjunction and enjambment, the jumpy narratology of scene change and disclosure. This translation is utterly contemporary and utterly timeless, capturing the spectrum of possibilities for the human voice registered by Insana’s work in the modern Sicilian dialect—the vulgarity, hilarity, intimacy, and outrage of a population expressed through its slang, obscenities, and terms of endearment.”

— Srikanth Reddy, Phoenix Poets series editor and author of "Underworld Lit"

TABLE OF CONTENTS