Description

Farrar, Straus & Giroux,hardcover

Publication Date:April 5, 2022

Publisher Marketing:Ange Mlinko alchemizes art and life into a dazzling collection of poetry.

InVenice,Ange Mlinko dissolves the boundaries between the sublime and the ordinary, the mythic and the rational, the past and the present. She sees a Roman tablet, scratched with Greek script, in the waxen wings of a bouffant bee, and she thinks of the abyss between two airport terminals when considering Rodins Gates of Hell. From Naples, Italy, to its sister city on the Gulf of Mexico, or at home, in the glow of a computer screen (I worry / that Zoom is ruled by djinn / that filter out the wavelength of love / and so I wear my evil eye jewelry / as you advised, against being too/much in view . . .), Mlinko probes the etymologies and eccentricities of all she encounters. As Dan Chiasson wrote inTheNew Yorker, Her extraordinary wit, monitoring its own excesses, is her compass.

On her travels, Mlinko scrapes at the patina of the past and considers the line between destruction and preservation. Sparking with wit and intelligence, the poets own lines break down and remake language, myth, and time. Mlinko is a poet of art and of life, andVeniceis a sumptuous exploration of poetrys capacity to capture the miracles and ironies of our times.