Watching Over a Hidden Treasure
Franca Mancinelli’s Poetic “Custodia”
John Taylor
Photo by Alessandra Calò
Beginning only a few days after we met in late November 2017 at a literary conference in Ljubljana, I started translating Franca Mancinelli’s writing, at first her third book, The Little Book of Passage, a collection of prose poems that was soon to be published in Italy. Besides this volume, three other books by Mancinelli are now available in English: At an Hour’s Sleep from Here, The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021, and All the Eyes that I Have Opened. Working closely together by e-mail and regularly discussing our literary and philosophical affinities, Mancinelli and I draw back the curtain here on one of her key-words, “custodia.” She first provides a text revealing how she views this concept, and it is followed by my analysis of the challenges raised when I render the term and its synonyms into English. —J. T.
Custodia
by Franca Mancinelli
A “custodia,” a “custodianship”—this is what we are in our earthly passage, even unconsciously, with our bodies: we watch over water, cells, energy, sounds, emotions, experiences and, as women, the possibility of generating another life. We are also called on to be “custodians” as artists, as human beings who can carry out creative acts in which a meaning is deposited that goes beyond the boundaries of a single existence, of a biographical identity, and continues to re-generate, transforming itself when it comes into contact with other existences, with other bodies. When a word is creative, it returns to the origin, in the childhood of humanity and of our lives, and becomes an act, a poiein (a “creative action or making” in ancient Greek) from which the world begins, from which the world can be reborn, can be saved.
As in a sequence that I really love from Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia, when the main character crosses the Bagno Vignoni pool while keeping the candle flame lit. What we must safeguard is what is most fragile—the foundation of life itself—and for this reason it requires our greatest capacity for attention and care. One needs to protect the flame with the palm of one’s hand and move forward while listening to every footstep; the slightest breath of wind is enough to snuff it. If so, one has to go back, relight the candle, and take the first step all over again. This cinematographic sequence comprises everything one needs to know about creative “making”: the tenacity and humility to face opposing forces, undergo failure, even several times, and go back to the beginning; total dedication to the assigned task; the canceling out of oneself because of the necessity to be an intermediary, channeling all one's presence to turn one's actions into a custodianship. And then the sacrifice; it is not possible to take care of something without sacrificing.
A still from Nostalghia: Gorchakov crossing the Bagno Vignoni pool
In fact, in Nostalghia, just as the lit candle reaches the other side of the pool, illuminating the destiny of the world, which is thus saved, Gorchakov, the Russian poet who has accomplished this task, dies. He who safeguards gives his entire life. But sacrifice is also included in the very act of safeguarding: to save what is most precious, we must abandon everything else. It is a law inherent to making poetry, where every word, every image that enters the rhythm, somehow carries within itself all the countless others that have remained silent: if I name a leaf, in that leaf live all the others of the woods, of every woods; if I name a fragment of my day, it resonates in all the others spent in oblivion. The words that we shape in the matter of the language until they become a poetic Word, a poiein—this is a custodianship, an ark: everything that enters saves itself and all the others, because it has the possibility of re-founding the world.
One who writes is essentially a guardian of a certain intensity and quantity of silence. An apparent silence, which resonates, as in the hollowness of a clay vase. The words arrive when the silence is full and overflows: it “pours,” which is the meaning of the Italian si versa (from the Latin vertere, “to turn,” whose past participle, versus, is at the origin of the term “verse”). A line of verse is therefore something that reaches an end to start again: it reverses the direction of the end towards a new beginning. Poetry has this great teaching to convey through the material of language: nothing ends, except to begin.
For this reason, there is an important transformative potential in the poetic experience, in the encounter with a voice that reaches us from a page or directly from things. Such a voice might have another name or ours: there is no difference. As authors, we are readers and translators of reality; as readers, we are in turn authors of words which, without our listening, without the custodianship provided by our body, would have remained dead letters. This is why I think of poetry as our mother tongue: in the encounter with the Poetic Word we come into contact with a force that takes care of us; while we despair over losses and deaths, like newborns in front of the temporary disappearance of the dearest face, poetry cradles us in its rhythm, brings us back into the flow of life, where every end is a beginning.
A still from Nostalghia: the candle at the other edge of the pool
For Pasolini, too, the creative act is connected to the possibility of safeguarding, as he writes in the screenplay of Teorema: “As soon as a sign miraculously shows itself up as successful, one must immediately protect it, guard it, as in a showcase.” And Franco Fortini in Composita solvantur (Loose Works in English), his testamentary book, recognizes in a night watch which he calls “custode,” “guardian,” a presence to whom he can entrust “the outcome, the residue,” the truth of his own existence, the voice that “consoles him to every death.”
The word “custodia” also recalls the image of protection exerted by a celestial force, by an angel. In my recent book All the Eyes that I Have Opened, I linked this image to trees, which are our teachers, models of how to root ourselves in the earth and in the sky and act as intermediaries between these two dimensions; besides being guides and reference points, trees are also our “guardians.” We can experience this ancient perception whenever we sit under the crown of a tree or walk in a forest between green archways filtering the sky; we are protected as when we remain underwater. From this experience derives the poem that concludes the section titled Master Trees in All the Eyes that I Have Opened:
entro nella pioggia come in un bosco
–ali fittamente intessute
aperte e richiuse sotto la scorza.
Cammino, la nuca protetta
dai miei custodi, liberato lo sguardo
dalla gabbia degli occhi.
I go into the rain as into a woods
—wings densely interwoven
opened and closed beneath the bark.
I walk, my nape protected
by my guardians, my gaze freed
from the cage of my eyes.
This text, translated here by John Taylor, has stemmed from the project Una come lei 2022, organized by Anna Franceschini and Roberta Sireno at the Biblioteca italiana delle Donne in Bologna. For an interview in Italian with Franca Mancinelli in the context of this project as well as a video reading by her, follow this link:
Franca Mancinelli’s Poetic “Custodia”
by John Taylor
As the translator of the Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s four books available in English, The Little Book of Passage, At an Hour’s Sleep from Here, The Butterfly Cemetery, and All the Eyes that I Have Opened, I have naturally been attentive to her key words, recurrent themes, and deep central images, all the more so in that we discuss them while I am translating. The reader of her poems, prose poems, and personal essays comes across terms (in their English garments) such as “fault lines” (or “cracks,” “fissures,” and other kinds of “gaps”), “ruins,” “collapse,” “openness,” “home,” “trees,” “birth,” “listening,” “blood,” “body,” “seeds,” and “roots.” Of her leitmotifs, one particularly polysemic group of Italian words—the nouns “custodia” and “custode,” and the verb “custodire,” along with their synonyms—is especially present in her work and thought. As will already be clear even to non-Italophones, who can find at least “custodia” and “custode” in the dictionary with at least one of the same meanings that it has in Italian, the semantic scope of these terms ranges from “custodianship” and “guardianship” to “safekeeping,” “safeguarding,” “preserving,” “protection,” “watching over,” “looking after,” “taking care of,” and “caring for.” It is this latter sense that I especially associate with Mancinelli’s literary sensibility and life philosophy.
“Safekeeping” and “safeguarding” do not quite designate the same activity, nor do “watching over” and “looking after.” “Taking care of” and “caring for” are also slightly different from these terms. “Guard” and “guardian” are not really the same. This is also true of “protecting” and “preserving.” Each of these potential English equivalents for this Italian word group possesses its own nuances and connotations. This gamut of fine shades of meanings in English already suggests the inner debates that necessarily take place in my mind when I am faced with one of these “custos-words,” as I am inclined to call them. And in the marginal notes that Mancinelli and I write to each other on the translation manuscripts that fly back and forth between us by e-mail, we delve into these nuances, endeavoring to pin down the most appropriate rendering for what she has written in Italian.
As often happens when translating a Romance language into English, a few (or, as with “custodia,” even several) English possibilities can exist for a given semantically resonant—in this case—Italian word. This is an extraordinary rich quality of languages stemming from Latin, in contrast to our equally rich (yet antipodal) English-language matter-of-factness, which enables us to be very precise with all the words at our disposal (flowing forth from the two vast rivers of Germanic and Franco-Latinate roots), but also sometimes metaphorically feeble when we are naming things or describing an action. Mancinelli is extremely attentive to—cares for—this figurative potential of her native language. Her skill at putting semantic resonance to work keeps her potent poems and prose poems, which are noted for their concision, so inducive to multiple interpretation, without, however, ever being obscure. In her texts, single words can open windows looking out on inner and outer landscapes with compelling horizons.
“Custos,” meaning “guardian,” is the Latin root behind “custodia,” which also existed in Latin with more or less the same senses as it has today in Italian. In her poetry and poetic prose, not to mention the narratives and personal essays of The Butterfly Cemetery (in which custos-words appear many times in various contexts), Mancinelli consistently probes ever deeper into the existential, ontological, psychological, natural-world and, more recently, archeological and anthropological subject matter that has solicited her “care”—the attitude and orientation at the very core of her “custodia.” This Latin term “custos” probably derives from the Into-European root *kustos and the Proto-Germanic root *huzdą. Although Indo-Europeanists, among themselves, do not agree on all the philological details, it seems likely that these root-words indicated “covering” or “hiding” and even perhaps a “hidden treasure,” next to which one would “sit.” Mutatis mutandis, I would like to declare that a poet is one who watches over and takes care of a hidden treasure. The act of poetry—the “creative making” that Mancinelli ties to the ancient Greek word poiein—is precisely this custodianship. This notion of caring for something very precious—her Italian language, the cosmos, living things, love, others to whom she gives voice or whose voices she represents—is central to her poetics.
Images of “custodia” and “caring” can be found in her earliest writings, going back well before the prose poems of The Little Book of Passage (2018), several of which, without using a specific custos-word, also deal with “custodia” themes; here, for example, where a “you” bears a “me” to safety:
You bear me to safety by raising the most fragile part of yourself. You resist amidst the tumult. And here you are at the threshold, clear light flashing through you. You no longer have a face, you’re beyond all contours. Only clear light. I’d like to gather you up in my hands, take you in you while you are born, but you gush forth: you are the primal current that cannot be touched.
In Mancinelli’s first book, Mala Kruna (2007), which is entirely rendered in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here, one such word crops up: “custodito,” which is the past participial form of the verb “custodire.” I decided to render the term with “shielded,” a synonym of “protected”:
he still watches over her face’s every vein,
careful that her weeping from grimaces or fever
grows silent, shielded
in the embrace that is the daily
stained dress.
Yet although this is the only instance where a “custos-word” occurs, not only in Mala Kruna but also in Mancinelli’s next book, Mother Dough (2013), which is also comprised in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here, other synonyms, images or themes recall the polysemy and semantic extensions of “custodia.” Love can take on this function, such as in this poem:
before words become hot wax
hands beckon to each other:
a prehistoric language
deaf like a stone, a downpour.
I ask and something else you answer,
so close is your steady palm
to the cliff
then my chin on your shoulder, my ear
against yours, our noses pointing away.
Other poems appeal to the imagery of “cradling,” which provides another form of caring, protecting, and safekeeping:
you can lean your head
where the soil sinks soft
into the cradle between the hills,
where it wears water
pursuing life’s tenuous bubble,
the smile enclosed within amber
skin, the animals fast asleep
in their winter lairs.
For Mancinelli, especially beginning with Mother Dough, the poet’s role can include placing one’s self in parenthesis and “yielding” one’s own words to others, that is, caring for their testimony, their lives, their voices. This is another aspect of “custodia”: going beyond the self and attending to others. The idea is beautifully expressed in her prose text “Yielding Words” (The Butterfly Cemetery), which also recounts how she became aware, as a very young girl, of the language deep within her. It was a matter of a heightened state not merely of self-awareness in the intellectual sense, but also of physiological self-awareness. The language was struggling to rise up through her throat and liberate itself, striving to utter a sentence like those spoken by the adults in her midst. As a consequence of this failure, she became conscious of the great responsibility implied in caring for this language that was within her and that wouldn’t fly up from her vocal chords. In such a context, initially autobiographical and then surpassing a strict autobiographical circumscription when she eventually becomes a writer, the individual voice evolves into a poetic voice, a poetic “Word,” as one might define it while recalling what is meant by “Word” in the Biblical context of “In the beginning was the Word”: a “parola,” as one can say in Italian, that is a poetic logos.
In this relation between the self and others (or, more generally, between the self and anything that is not the self), the verb “custodire” or one of its synonyms takes on the connotation, not only of receiving a gift and safeguarding it, but also of “welcoming” and even “bringing together.” In one of Mancinelli’s most semantically resonant poems, also found in Mala Kruna, she outlines the image of a “ragazza arco,” a female figure who especially represents an “arch” or “archway,” although the Italian word “arco” can also mean “bow” as in “bow and arrow.” This “woman archway,” the image that I ultimately ended up choosing in English for this polysemic Italian image, “places one foot in the air and joins / constellations of the unborn / to the cry that has now broken the waters.” The “archway” links debris and births, encounters and abandonments. “In her way of welcoming,” comments Mancinelli in an interview (which I cite in my introduction to At an Hour’s Sleep from Here), “in her feeling that with every step great things might happen, the woman unites two opposite poles.” “Opening oneself up to life can imply an effacement of one’s own borders,” continues the poet, “even self-destruction, but also becoming someone who includes others and brings them onto ‘the train of my blood.’” Here is the entire poem:
and the woman archway
places one foot in the air and joins
constellations of the unborn
to the cry that has now broken the waters,
she hangs her skin from a branch, captures
the wind, is a shopping bag
of others’ wishes
vanished in a glance
on the train of my blood
come aboard
A still from the video-poem “risonanze 3”, devoted to Franca Mancinelli, by zona disforme – Carlotta Cicci and Stefano Massari
More examples can be found in Mother Dough, whose very title signifies a kind of custodianship. “Mother dough” (“Pasta madre” in Italian) is the portion of natural yeast-infused dough that one saves and preserves, indeed keeps alive, so that it can be used in the next batch of baking. One kneads it into the new dough so that this dough will rise, but before giving a final shape to the bread or pasta and putting it into the oven, one cuts off a small portion of this new dough and puts it aside. It will be used the next time. A piece of this “mother dough” is usually not sold but given to another person, who then must take care of it, regularly adding water and flour; otherwise, it will dry up and die. It is passed down from generation to generation. As Mancinelli has explained, “mother dough is a material that has an inexhaustible potential for generation, for life, and at the same time it is very fragile. If it is not nourished by someone, it dies; if it is not welcomed, it remains unfinished and formless. Writing for me is something very similar: it can be the mother of many things, bringing them to light, but it is only in the relationship with the other, in his or her listening space, that a meaning rises.” Such a title therefore offers multiple metaphorical ramifications, with poetry, like mother dough, being that which keeps language alive.
In the same book, other examples reveal still different dimensions of the poet’s poetics of custodianship. Her poem “buckets scattered about the room,” which points to her typical theme of ruin and collapse (in all practical, psychological, and existential senses of the term), concludes in the equally typical image of healing. By looking at a disaster in a certain way, by caring for how one looks at disaster, by becoming the custodian of one’s gaze, the negative elements can be transformed into something—here, water—positive that can cure. It is indeed the cracks in the roof and ceiling that allow the water to enter:
buckets scattered about the room,
empty notebooks. They’ll come back
like leaks that shatter,
but cry anyway and learn
from the overflowing eaves
fonts of holy water
at the door where everyone
heals his hands.
In other words, “custodia” cleanses, regenerates, transforms. Writing—the filling of those empty notebooks—is an essential part of the process. Writing is, in fact, an act of custodia. Here, it has acknowledged the difficulty and then drawn from it what can be learned: the rainwater overflowing from the eaves can also restore.
In 2016, Mancinelli, speaking about “poetry and rituality” at a literary conference in Cagliari, Sardinia, explained how “cracks,” “fissures,” and even “fault lines” (as I termed them in one prose poem from The Little Book of Passage) are formed and induce a creative process. They enable her to remain open to something unexpected. “The poems of Pasta Madre were born,” she observes, “while my whole body was immersed in actions such as walking the dog, sweeping the floor, or washing the dishes; these actions had become a ritual (a salvatory practice, a way of rooting myself in life). As I gave myself over to the body, to what it was doing, a crack would be created, a gap through which a line of verse entered. I work from images that begin to penetrate my mind, such as the disturbing signs left on the wall by leaking water. Such images convey something insistent, both awaited and feared, almost a threat. They shatter what had, until recently, appeared safe and familiar. I do nothing but collect, take in this minimal and continuous loss, until I reach the brim, an unsustainable silence.”
In other poems, the hands that have been “healed” in the above poem are themselves essential factors in caring, indeed healing. In the following poem, also from Mother Dough, they not only wash the poet’s eyes, but reinvigorate her sense of sight, enabling her, by means of their touch, to see her own face emerging as if in a mirror—perhaps in fact her own face that had vanished, as if through a loss of self, of her most intimate identity. This face is, in turn, equated to a bright cove, still another image of protection, safekeeping, and shelter. Even as a boat might refurbish and replenish itself in a cove or harbor, the hands have led to, or at least have tendered the promise of, the recovery of a well-being that had disappeared or been destroyed:
also these hands I open
brimming with shadow to wash
my eyes in the morning,
these hands know where a face
emerged, a deep
bright cove.
Rather like a cove, another non-human entity, a “spoon,” stands out as the symbol of a “welcoming in,” of nourishment, both of oneself and of another person. Love is at work and therefore a kind of reciprocal custodianship:
if we were feverish together
we’d be like two spoons
put back dry in the drawer.
Our feet to and fro like rags
to caress the floors
or we’d stay naked like nails
forgotten in the middle of the wall.
A spoon, here formed by hands, also appears as that which can cradle and console:
while chewing he dozes off,
pierces his heart,
makes a spoon of his hands
to hold his face.
A still from Cucchiaio nel sonno, video-poem by Elena Bauke
More generally, not only the hands but the entire body offers a kind of “custodia” or, at least, should do so. Mancinelli’s best-known poem, which she often reads in public and which has also been interpreted in the video-poem Cucchiaio nel sonno (by Elena Bauke), is “a spoon in sleep.” The body, depicted in a dream, is like a container through which living beings continue to move and migrate:
a spoon in sleep, the body
gathers the night. Swarms buried
in our chests arise, spread
their wings. How many animals
migrate within us,
passing through our heart, halting
on the curve of a hip, among the branches
of the ribs, how many
would rather not be us,
not be ensnared
between our human contours.
However brief in duration, the entire body—not merely the “mind,” which, moreover, is not evoked all that often as such by Mancinelli—also contains and thus must care for Time. She often emphasizes how our corporal existence is transitory, a state or a form that will metamorphose into other states or forms. She characteristically envisions Time and Being on a much vaster terrestrial, even cosmic level, suggesting that an essential element of our “custodia” is the necessity of apperceiving this dimension and assimilating its implications:
how much time you contain
now that you’re amber
and perhaps you’d like
an insect stuck, fallen
inside you, sunk
into your permeated body:
“soon everything will be spilled,
I’ll have no mirrors.”
At the same time in this poem, the time contained by the body can be interpreted as the period of pregnancy. The uterus contains a tiny life, like a drop of amber with an insect caught inside it. However, unlike the immobility of the insect and time in general in the piece of amber, here time eventually “will pour out” (“verserà” in Italian, which has the same root as “verse,” as the poet herself points out in her text “Custodia”). It will exit from the body at birth. There is an absorbing documentary film interview with Mancinelli, beautifully filmed in her hometown of Fano, in which she speaks about her writing, her poetics, her own pregnancy and its relation to her creativity. The film, a part of the excellent zona|disforme series devoted to contemporary Italian poets, has English subtitles.
In her most recent book, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, custos-words crop up even more frequently, indeed six times, not to mention the several synonyms or related themes embodying the various semantic ramifications of “custodia.” One striking poem, which (as in the previous example evoking amber) outlines a vast terrestrial perspective in regard to death and metamorphosis, takes off from the simple image of a potted plant. The poem brings forth one of Mancinelli’s deep thematic concerns, inspired by the well-known lines from T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker” section in Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end. [. . .] In my end is my beginning.” Yet even as the Anglo-American poet places “ends” and “beginnings” on the ontological level, Mancinelli’s poems also engage tangibly with our being-in-the-cosmos and in addition—this is not necessarily within Eliot’s scope—with the question of “how to live.” “Custodia,” here translated as “safekeeping,” belongs to this central issue:
burial. And beginning. I am potted
and possessed. I live in the earth’s
safekeeping, with hands sunk
like roots at work.
Other custos-words or custodia-related terms emphasize the notion of “guardians” (“custodi”). These guardians take on a special importance in All the Eyes that I Have Opened, one of whose themes, presented in various positive and negative ways, is that of the Other (be it human or non-human) exerting benevolence or not. One key-poem is comprised in one of the most emblematic sections, Master Trees. In Italian, “alberi maestri” also means the “mainmasts” of a ship; in English, we can think of a related, though different, nautical term that has a figurative meaning: “mainstays.” These “master trees” are the poet’s “guardians,” underneath whose protective canopy she walks in this poem (which she also cites in her prose text “Custodia”):
I go into the rain as into a woods
—wings densely interwoven
opened and closed beneath the bark.
I walk, my nape protected
by my guardians, my gaze freed
from the cage of my eyes.
Much later in the book, in the last section, Diary of Passage, Mancinelli returns to the imagery of trees and specifically tree bark in an especially significant way. This section offers a sequel and a response to the first section, Jungle, which evokes the daily toils and tortures of a migrant woman on one of the Balkan Routes, which the poet actually visited in 2018 during her participation in the European project “Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes.” In Diary of Passage, the migrant woman is still present, but so also is the poet, who sometimes blends with her as the narrator, as it were. At one point she avows: “I don’t know why I’m here.” That is, she implicitly asks a manifold question encompassing our own quests as well: Why I have attempted to migrate to Europe and change my life? Why I am wandering along the Balkan Routes, with a pen and notebook in my hand, and trying to understand why others are daring to cross the border here, despite the police? In general, why are any of us “here,” whatever “here” might be?
And what is the narrator’s answer to these questions? “Perhaps I have obeyed the sound of broken branches,” she conjectures, “which reaches me from this unknown language, like walking in a dense forest. There is something immediately familiar in these bits of bark that preserve meanings. It suffices to repeat the name of a place like Zagreb or Kraj Donji to make something mysterious move, like sunrays penetrating entwined branches, or the trail of an animal through a thicket. It is the enchantment of a preverbal world, of good and evil spirits, which immediately envelops me and swallows me back into it, beyond the threshold where a decision can be made, a choice formulated.” The Italian word for “preserve” in the quotation is “custodiscono,” the third-person plural present form of the verb “custodire.” The presence of trees and their naturally generous custodia, combined with the narrator’s endeavor to infuse with custodia her own way of being, of seeing and sensing, are perhaps leading to greater self-understanding and even to self-transformation.
Franca Mancinelli’s books in English translation:
The Little Book of Passage, The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018
At an Hour’s Sleep from Here, The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019
The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose (2008-2021), The Bitter Oleander Press, 2022.
All the Eyes that I Have Opened, Black Square Editions, 2023.
About Franca Mancinelli:
Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. She is widely considered to be one of the most compelling new poetic voices in Italian poetry. Nearly all of her writing to date is available in John Taylor’s translations for The Bitter Oleander Press and Black Square Editions. Taylor and Mancinelli also carry on a dialogue about literary, philosophical, and spiritual issues: the first part was published in the special feature, on her writing, in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Bitter Oleander; a second part appeared online in Hopscotch Translation (July 2021); and a third part, which was originally broadcast on Trafika Europe Radio, was published in Eurolitkrant (April 2022). Mancinelli has been selected for the ongoing European poetry project “Versopolis,” was the Chair Poet in Residence (Calcutta, India) in January–February 2019, and participated in the European program “Refest: Images and Words on Refugee Routes” in February 2018. Her writing is also featured in the University of Oxford project “Non solo muse: panorama della poesia italiana dal 1970 a oggi,” edited by Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages.
About John Taylor:
John Taylor was born in Des Moines in 1952. He has lived in France since 1977. Among his many translations of French, Italian, and Modern Greek literature are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Pascal Quignard, Jacques Dupin, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Catherine Colomb, Lorenzo Calogero, Alfredo de Palchi, Elias Petropoulos, and Elias Papadimitrakopoulos. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books, 2017), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press, 2017), Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), and a “double book” coauthored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (The Fortnightly Review Press, 2018).