Greg Bem Archives

Amelia Rosselli
Translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard
World Poetry ($24)

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.

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Joe Hall
Black Ocean ($17)

by Greg Bem

The grotesque yet inquisitive poetry of Joe Hall returns to the limelight in Fugue and Strike. The book has six sections and opens with a short sequence, “From People Finder Buffalo”; its vital poems on the economy and police violence instill in the reader a sense of the core protections of the structures that impose upon our communities and threaten our collective livelihood.

Fugue and Strike bursts from the seams through its two largest sections, where Hall brings together distinct series of poems that tackle one large theme: labor. The first, “From Fugue & Fugue,” falls in the lucid tracks of other serial works like John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, where Hall’s distinctive, deranged, and blunt imagery centers the whirlwind lives of the American working class. The poems in this sequence are some of Hall’s most experimental, their language derivative of both machine-like repetition and the manic bracing of daily stress:

I consider debt, each word, each poem
an easter egg, w/absence inside and inside absence
you are hunger, breathing this time and value
particularized into mist, you are there, at the end
of another shift

Following the fugues, the hypnotic and didactic series “Garbage Strike” sheds light on the history of sanitation worker strikes from the 1600s to the present. Across international cities including New York City, Oaxaca, Buffalo, Tokyo, and Memphis, Hall’s poems dig deep into the folds of garbage, trash, refuse, and output on a massive scale. These are stories of people deserving of the spotlight, of ecosystems of everyday life. Hall highlights the work of society’s perceived lowest working classes, those the systems want invisible or forgotten:

I want the history of lurching waste flows and accumulation, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers: Mudlarks; dirt-carters; loaders of horse-corpse barges, dung ships, and containerships; workers in ship-breaking yards; emotional garbage sorters and haulers. What if it was a celebrated labor? To disassemble the titans.

The book closes with a cluster of three standalone poems, “I Hate That You Died,” “The Wound,” and “Polymer Meteor”; each confronts loss separately while getting to catharsis collectively. In the final poem, Hall closes the book with statements on rigorous criticism, outreach towards sustainability, and our persistence through cycles of production:

Given that we, flesh, are affiliated with so many polymer immortals, I would like to suggest we imagine future time as present weight in order to see the world. If long after our bodies die, the case of a cell phone lives on into the thousands of years, its mass multiplied by (all that) time, would be unliftable. It would break your floors.

Like the contemporary American working-class poetry of Ryan Eckes, Robert Mittenthal, and Tim Greenup, the poems in Fugue and Strike foster a sense of irony combining labor and solidarity. Hall may not be overtly Marxist in his words, but he consistently throws punches against capitalism. His tones are derived from a spectrum of monotony and crisis with speakers engaging in moments of reflection amidst toil, explosions, brutal reckonings, and epiphanies.

As his fourth full-length collection, Fugue and Strike feels more mature than Hall’s previous releases; form across the collection feels neatly fitted despite the sprawling subject matter. Balancing personal stories with historic retellings, the book bears an academic level of research and contains an extensive bibliography. Coming out of a world of education and pedagogy, this poetry may serve for many as a kaleidoscopic keystone into the relentlessness of work, the void of commodification, the hope of solidarity, and the necessity of revolt.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Book Review, Poetry Reviews