Unearthed

by Federica Santini

When you start digging in Santini’s poetry, you have no idea of what you might be unearthing, but can rest assured that none of the findings will be less than exciting. Her compressed and high voltage syntagms move sharply and elegantly in a sea of intuitions, each one of which claims exclusive attention, thus undermining any attempt at turning metaphors into similitudes or objective correlatives. If Eliot’s April is merely a cruel month, Santini’s May is a month of “knives in the water” (Polansky docet) and the frozen landscapes that appear at almost regular intervals in her poems bear the mark of an indomitable struggle against “milk-words / [that] spoil fast in the fading light / of the process / overgrowth of sense.” In a world where writing obtains all too often below the zero-degree line, every sequence of this Unearthed is a powerful and moving testimony of what poetry can do to liberate language from the curse of sterile repetitions, restoring for us all the pleasure of seeking, and exchanging, instances of a formerly unsuspected reality.
Luigi Ballerini, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, author of Cephalonia and Eccetera, E

Federica Santini’s Unearthed is a stunning collection of poems that dig deep into the earth and into your being. It brilliantly, poetically asks us to go beyond having casual conversations with the earth, ourselves, and each other in order to touch, smell, feel what is underneath. This is where we come alive. This is poetry at its best.
Jacinta V. White, author of Resurrecting the Bones, publishing editor of Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing

The vibrant poems of Federica Santini’s Unearthed explore loss, yearning, and transformation in worlds rich with imagery and metaphors where “In the garden unruly / weed-foxes grow feisty” and “The grass of wanting has sharp blades.” Santini’s poetry dauntlessly uncovers what is hidden, from creatures that bite and sing, to recluse and rhizome bodies, and the shape-shifting compound water—“Make it rise from twisted veins / with forked rod, bifurcated tongue lapping…” In this remarkable collection, Federica Santini is the diviner.
Jules Jacob, author of The Glass Sponge

48 pages, Paperback

Published September 3, 2021

About the author

Federica Santini is Professor of Italian and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University, where she coordinates the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian literature from UCLA and a Laurea in Lettere Moderne from the University of Siena, Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Plath Profiles, Rogue Agent, and Italian Culture, among others, as well as in many edited volumes. As a translator, she has published translations of US poets for Mondadori and Nino Aragno, as well as translations of Italian poets for the University of Toronto Press. She has authored or co-edited six volumes, among which her monograph, Io era una bella figura una volta: Viaggio nella poesia di ricerca del secondo Novecento (Scritture, 2013) and her poetry chapbook, Unearthed (Kelsay Books 2021).