The Butterfly Cemetery

by Franca Mancinelli, John Taylor (Translator)

“This precious and intricately structured book gathers the most important prose narratives and personal essays that Franca Mancinelli has written alongside her verse poetry and prose poetry during the years 2008-2021. It is also a unique volume, for English readers, in that the author has not yet collected the original texts into a book: several of the pieces are unpublished in Italian, whereas the others have appeared in journals, in anthologies, and on websites. Several narratives are autobiographical and thereby disclose some of the personal sources of her writing, as she focuses on key events during her childhood and her passage into adolescence, while other texts raise questions about the self and its role in her poetics, notably the place of “the other” and the possibilities of an “open identity” that goes “beyond human contours.”

—---from John Taylor’s postface “Franca Mancinelli: Facing the Invisible”

177 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took my time with this collection of prose pieces by Italian poet, Franca Mancinelli. She is one of my favourite living poets; her work deals with so many of the existential kinds of questions that haunt me—otherness, belonging, identity, passages, darkness. Her poetry tends to be very open and spare, but in her prose there is a deep poetic intensity. This work includes pieces with a personal tone, looking at childhood and her homeland, losing and finding herself, but there are also a number of wonderful reflections on what poetry means, where it comes from. There is so much beauty here, so much to think about, that I am grateful for John Taylor's fine translation.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/07/21/th...

[Brian Brogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful depths, insights and explorations.

[Michael Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/n...