Most contemporary poets wear their cultural and artistic influences on their sleeve. Picking up a book in an English language bookstore, it is easy to see where the poet is coming from, either geographically, or culturally (ironic and formal; confessional and free etc). This may seem reductive until you read a book like the one you have in your hands. Put simply, Mia Lecomte is a quietly dazzling poet on her own terms. She is fed by multiple cultures, she is widely read, but her writing is unique and absolutely genuine. You won't have read anything like this.

Poet and author of children’s books and plays, Mia Lecomte lives in Rome. Among her most recent poetry publications are Autobiografie non vissute (2004) and Terra di risulta (2009), from which a part of this translation was taken. She is an honourary member of the French Association “Confluences poétiques,” and her poems have been translated and published in Italy and abroad. She edited the anthology Ai confini dei verso – Poesia della migrazione in italiano (2006), Sempre ai confini del verso – Dispatri poetici in italiano (2011), and co-edited A New Map – The Poetry of Migrant Writers in Italy (2011) with Luigi Bonaffini.

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Johanna Bishop was born in Chicago in 1974, grew up in Pennsylvania, and has been living in Tuscany since 1998. She primarily translates texts by contemporary Italian artists, curators and critics. In the field of poetry, her translations of poems by Gherardo Bortolotti, Franco Buffoni, Marco Giovenale, Andrea Inglese, Marina Massenz, Michele Zaffarano and Laura Zanetti have appeared over the years in the bilingual review Here: Notes from the Present. She has also translated works by Maria Grazia Calandrone for the theatrical performances Gernika and Senza bagaglio. In collaboration with Andrea Sirotti, she co-translated Danza del ventre a Tel Aviv / Belly Dancing in Tel Aviv by English-language Israeli poet Karen Alkalay-Gut into Italian (Kolibris, 2010).

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