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Corporeal, homoerotic, reified and ethereal.
Pierre Lepori's Almost Love (Quasi Amore) contains forty-five short stanzas, reminiscent of a lyric tradition extending from the Greek elegiac poets, such as Sappho and Mimnermus, to the Italian poet, Sandro Penna. The poems revolve around the word "love" as compared to the precariousness of life and the incompleteness of language, thus generating new images in a poetry that is corporeal, homoerotic, reified and at the same time ethereal. As Lepori writes, "There are forms of love - both physical and spiritual - that escape the events of what we call reality by convention."
Peter Valente
Translated by
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twenty-two full length books, including a translation of Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, which received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. His most recent books are The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical and Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes and his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan. He lives in Castle Hayne, North Carolina.
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