Last Stops of the Night Journey - Paperback

by Milo de Angelis (Author), Susan Stewart (Translator), Patrizio Ceccagnoli (Translator)

Glimmering meditations on time, memory, imprisonment, human connection, life and death by the preeminent Italian language poet, Milo De Angelis

An arrow hits a grape and carries it through the air, a hand untangles a knot, a voice emerges from a stone to speak about life. In his poems, Milo De Angelis attends to the experience of confinement. Since 1996, he has taught poetry in a high-security prison on the outskirts of Milan. He sees poetry as a daily salvation; when the knot comes undone, it "carries back the sweet human voice of bodies in motion." And when the stone cracks open, a voice tells of you and of me, a shared story. De Angelis never shies from the deep fears, darkness, and indeterminacy of incarceration. The characters of these poems wonder whether they will survive. They know all that stays hidden in an end, and they plan for their salvation. Milo De Angelis's language is ancient and new, transcendent, and urgent. Last Stops of the Night Journey pulses with the immensity of silence, memory, life, time, and fear. De Angelis insists that the infinite language of poetry can speak to the incarcerated person, greet them, know them, and chart a world beyond physical walls.

Author Biography

From his publication of Somiglianze at the age of 25, Milo De Angelis has garnered much recognition. Known beyond his poetry for his literary essays and his translations of Virgil, Lucretius, Racine, Baudelaire, Blanchot, and others, in the 1970's he founded the literary journal Il Niebo. In 2005, his Tema dell'addio was awarded the Premio Viareggio. In 2011 Quell'andarsene was awarded the Premio Cetonaverde, the Premio Pascoli, the Premio Romagna, and the Premio Mondello. Incontri e agguati received the Premio Dessì, the Premio Nazionale di Poesia "Luciana Notari," and the Premio Castello di Villalta Poesia in 2016. In 2017, De Angelis was awarded the prestigious Premio Lerici Pea for his body of work.

Susan Stewart, the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, is a poet, critic, and translator. A former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American poets, she is the author of six books of poems, including Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her many prose works include On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, and The Poet's Freedom. Her forthcoming book The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture will be available from The University of Chicago Press in Fall 2019.

Patrizio Ceccagnoli is a translator, a managing editor of Italian Poetry Review, and a professor of Italian at the University of Kansas. He has edited multiple unpublished manuscripts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for which he was nominated for the Marino Moretti Award. He has also been nominated for the American Literary Translator's Association Annual Award for his work co-translating Milo De Angelis.