Elisa Biagini

Biagini’s poetry depicts a domestic, almost everyday world which is also powerfully metaphorical and contained within the limits of a house or a room. In this narrow world, existence becomes contracted and distorted until it is reduced to fragments of the body, revealing gestures, daily objects, and private obsessions, all of which reveal our crude perception of the disaster of human relationships, or the malaise of daily life.

In the metaphorical world of Elisa Biagini’s poetry, bodies transform into new and unexpected elements, visions become deformed sensations, and the laborious search for meaning becomes absolute bewilderment. The body is at the very centre of everything, and everything that takes place under the skin becomes a metaphor and transfiguration of existence. The end result is a ruthless analysis of living, characterized by a chilling disenchantment. In this harsh, disconcerting conception, the organic fuses with the inorganic, the unearthing of sensations with an autopsy, and food becomes one with the carnal and intimate transmission of moods and emotions.

The body as dramatic and merciless protagonist already appeared in the ‘Morgue’ series of poems (1998) – present among the texts selected here – and inspired by Andres Serrano’s photographs of cadavers. Marco Simonelli writes that, in these crude and stinging images, “Elisa Biagini’s writing penetrates into the bodies and gives each one a history, a face, a final and decisive sensation that determines the limit, that mends the violently torn skin. It is a short and complex work in which the author operates on the text like a pathologist performing an autopsy: she cuts and sews up the limbs, she explores the wounds, she traces and takes note of the causes of death with the help of images that are as simple as they are effective.”

Elisa Biagini’s poetic language is hard, dry and essential; it is also elliptical, but never obscure. It coalesces into a real world which is not at all consolatory, but which alternates violent, hard and merciless tones with melancholy ones, because – as Biagini herself affirms – “Writing poetry means forcing yourself to rediscover (and to cause to rediscover) reality, to pause for a longer time in front of things, to hear their inner noise.” Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo


Poems
{id="6881" title="Morgue"}
{id="6885" title="The voice does not connect"}
{id="6891" title="When you discover those long cuts"}
{id="6895" title="You show me your wounds"}
{id="6879" title="Mended nerves"}
{id="6873" title="I translate your life"}
{id="6889" title="Tight so"}
{id="6871" title="Child in the"}
{id="6875" title="In the velvet shell"}
{id="6877" title="Lose yourself, child"}
{id="6869" title="Spit out by the forest"}
{id="6893" title="Why"}
{id="6887" title="Through the path"}
{id="6883" title="The darkness dries up"}


Also on this site
{id="6864" title="The Job of the Poet"}
Essay by Elisa Biagini


Bibliography
Poetry
Questi nodi, Firenze, Gazebo, 1993
Morgue, in Franco Buffoni (ed.), Sesto quaderno italiano di poesia contemporanea, Milano, Marcos y Marcos, 1998
Uova, Genova, Zona, 1999
L'Ospite, Torino, Einaudi 2004

Anthologies
Nuovi Poeti Americani, edited by Elisa Biagini, Torino, Einaudi 2005
Nuovissima poesia italiana, Mondadori, 2004
Parola Plurale, Sossella, 2005


Link
In English
Italian American Writers
Contemporary Italian American Writing site