by Greg Bem

We were looking for a crossing last night
not a clear country road nor a city street
but a simple passage: we found
death! as always, death!

The latest book by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli to be translated into English is her sprawling third collection, Document. Originally published in 1976, it captures a significant chapter of the late poet’s life, where daily musings and reflections were chiseled into literary form and experimentation. This marvelous bilingual edition is also a challenge to readers in its size and scope, offering over 400 pages of complex thoughts and linguistic layers.

Document searches a world moving past one arm of authoritarianism and fascism into new, confusing chapters. Rosselli’s intensely crafted book is both large and elegant, filled with intentional arrangements of verse that are inspired by the Petrarchan sonnet yet also offer the postmodern pleasures of sequential structure and call and response between poems. The poet invites the reader to critically examine the text through its relentless references and embedded connections, as in “Concatenation of causes: you’ve seen the shadow”:

Teargas bombs: they chose a field
completely indifferent to you to fraternize
with the strike of renouncing
yourself: that it was you, and so my

beating heart doesn’t want peace only oblivion

on the highest branch of the sky.

Though much of the book was written by 1969, the poems cover events between 1966 and 1973. The subject matter is intensely autobiographical, and the lack of context may occasionally feel frustrating; the editors acknowledge there isn’t nearly enough space in the text itself to address this, and offer a handful of notes in the back of the book to give the reader a sense of the poet’s journey through her own work. Still, even without biographical context, Rosselli’s poetry appears crafted through absorption—of the world and its trauma, its overbearing weights, its peripheries within shadows—leaving the reader with mystery and a phantasmagorical surfacing of images and settings.

It’s fortunate that Document comes in a bilingual format, because Rosselli’s poems are a joy to read across both languages. Her careful attention to musicality—the poet was, in fact, also an accomplished musician—leads to powerful moments in punctuation, syntax, and the line, as seen in “Cold is scary and blood too”:

I’m cold today and I don’t know why a new
attitude sifts through my heart: but
it’s not true that tomorrow is certain
and it’s not true that today is calm.

These acrobatics in logic reflect a mind that is curious, wandering, and far from satisfied. Rosselli’s work in Document yields many emotional and psychic tributaries of thought, though many of them are deceiving; a poem may feel or allude to doom and malaise on its first read, only to offer confidence and critical inquiry on its second. Take these lines from “Flanking the empty tree the ants’”:

                       What could it have been
this arid genius that put so many obstacles

in the way of a richer safeguard? Maybe
life is defeated and has no species resolved
to fight evil.

Emerging out of incredibly transformative years in the 1960s and ¢70s, these poems are deeply embedded in contemporary moral inquiries across disciplines, and while they may be presented neatly, they are far from neat; their kaleidoscopic nature resonates.

It would be remiss to not mention Rosselli’s death by suicide approximately thirty years after the poems in this book were written. The editors describe the work of this collection as profound, as it established the arrival of Rosselli’s poetry when it was first published; Rosselli’s was indeed a profound voice of the postwar period, offering comments through a raw and emerging anti-fascist lens in Europe. How might Document inspire readers in another chapter, as we watch the world corrode with fascism again? Translator Roberta Antognini’s afterword provides Rosselli’s emerging English-language audience with biographical information that may inspire some answers, as well as further exploration of her work.