Title: Locomotrix : selected poetry and prose of Amelia Rosselli /
Authors: Rosselli, Amelia, 1930-1996; Scappettone, Jennifer; Rosselli, Amelia, 1930-1996.
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press,
Year: 2012
Subjects: Italian poetry; Italian prose literature.
Abstract: A musician, musicologist, and self-defined "poet of research," Amelia Rosselli (1930-96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England, and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli's trilingual body of work synthesizes a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective orientation, "where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen." Having chosen Italy as an "ideal fatherland," Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, irrevocably changed the Italian language.