by Franca Mancinelli
translated from the Italian by John Taylor

Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981) is one of the most important poetic voices in Italian poetry. All of her published work is available in John Taylor’s English translations. The Bitter Oleander Press has issued The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019), as well as a volume gathering Mancinelli’s prose narratives and personal essays, The Butterfly Cemetery (2022). Her most recent Italian volume, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos, 2020), which won two national Italian prizes, was published in English in 2023 by Black Square Editions as All the Eyes that I Have Opened.

John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His most recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Béatrice Douvre, Charline Lambert, Veroniki Dalakoura, and Elias Petropoulos. His own volumes of poetry and poetic prose include Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges, which is a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, and What Comes from the Night. website: http://johntaylor-author.com