Language is always about transitions, and these compositions represent transitional moments experienced with others. From a child’s first responses to the world, to a mother’s last words, from the incongruities of cross-language dialogues, to the frame narratives of lives lived within multiple cultural contexts, the words contained within these pages are the expression of a need to shave communication as close to silence as possible. Only You is an invitation to contemplate our singularity not as individualism but as communal and participatory.

Pasquale Verdicchio teaches literature and film in the department of literature at the University of California-San Diego. As a poet, translator, and essayist, he has published translations of Pasolini, Merini, Caproni, Porta, and Gramsci. He is the author of Devils In Paradise: Writings on Post-Emigrant Cultures and the poetry collection The House Is Past, Passenger: Selected Poems (Porta, Antonio and Pasquale Verdicchio, 2000) and The Wall of the Earth(Caproni, Giorgio and Pasquale Verdicchio, 1992).

Pasquale Verdicchio's profile page

Only You etches a range of poignant poetic and compositional spaces, the most intriguing of which is the space of 'between.' In these poems, buttressed with a useful note on his poetics of translation, Pasquale Verdicchio offers us a look at an imagination 'unobstructed by borders.' This is a writing that keeps us on our toes as we carefully cross through unpredictable traffic trying to find the way home.

Fred Wah