Venice: Poems

by Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko alchemizes art and life into a dazzling collection of poetry in Venice

In Venice, 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 Rodin’s 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 in The New 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 poet’s own lines break down and remake language, myth, and time. Mlinko is a poet of art and of life, and Venice is a sumptuous exploration of poetry’s capacity to capture the miracles and ironies of our times.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Hardcover

Published April 5, 2022

About the author

Ange Mlinko is an American poet. The author of four books of poetry, she is currently an associate professor in the English department at the University of Florida. She was the poetry editor for The Nation from 2013-2016.

Reviews

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“If you travel far enough, you’ll eventually meet yourself,” said Joseph Campbell. In this collection, the poet seems a little jet-lagged from her self-exploration. The jaunting back and forth between Venice and Florida has lent a kind of “tedio” or “noia” to these poems, perhaps borne of too much familiarity with the landscapes, her companions, or herself. Much of the collection “evinces the nature/ of a souvenir plate” (p. 23), like “remontant” roses in their “furibund overproduction/ showing diminishing returns” (p. 82).

“How then is
she so long and slow
to make amends with herself? . . .”
—from ‘Envoi’ in “Sleepwalking in Venice,” p. 37

Favorite Poems:
“Venus in Naples”
“September in the Capital”
“It Decides to Rain”
“The Sirens Have Stopped Singing”
“Country Music”

[Reagan Kapasi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me

[Beatrice]

I do like the idea of Zoom ruled by djinni.

[Duffy]

Not for me.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

nuanced, densely-packed, and formal poetry - works with a sense of recursiveness mirroring the collection's connecting threads