Condominium of the Flesh

FREE VERSE EDITIONS SERIES, edited by Jon Thompson TRANSLATED BY CLARISSA BOTSFORD A darkly humorous exploration of the human body and its various functions in poetic prose, Valerio Magrelli's The Condominium of the Flesh, a personal chronicle of his clinical experience, catalogues a life history of ailments without ever being pathological. Every sensation and malfunction is placed under the subjective microscope of the poet's eye and examined in excruciating and obsessive detail. This Gray's Anatomy of the soul leads the reader on an inside-out voyage of discovery, with many surprises on the way. One of Italy's most celebrated living poets, Valerio Magrelli has attracted an international following. PRAISE FOR VALERIO MAGRELLI'S POETRY: "I used to read a great many Italian poets. Nowhere near as many in recent years-though I've seen things by a young poet that I like very much. His name is Magrelli."-JOSEPH BRODSKY "His poetry is a soliloquy written with a pencil and a small note-book, during the latest and most silent hours of the night. It's a poetry that looks at itself, but at the sight of its thought, vanishes." -OCTAVIO PAZ "Magrelli's poems make me feel good because they are so smart. Aphoristic and quirky, they seem from another millennium. I eat them up like clusters of grapes, and when I'm done I want more. I love their wry modesty, their strange truisms, and their beautiful succinctness." -HENRI COLE "Molino's translations of Valerio Magrelli's poetry bring to English-speaking readers some of the most astounding verse to be found in contemporary Italian letters. Here, a great deal of precious cargo has made it intact to the shores of the English-speaking world, and we are enriched by the arrival of such rich, strange, and new matter." -REBECCA WEST