Hospital Series

Poetry. Italian Studies. Translated from the Italian by Diana Thow. In Amelia Rosselli's first book of poetry, WAR VARIATIONS, violence and war become the canvas for her dynamic experimentation. In her second book, HOSPITAL SERIES, Rosselli turns her attention inward to the landscape and language of illness. In HOSPITAL SERIES, illness is not a metaphor but a lens, a mode of perception, a dual structure of constraint and release: "here madness you arranged/ a kind of party," she writes: "you set me free." In this bilingual edition, HOSPITAL SERIES is preceded by a long early poem by Rosselli from 1958, entitled The Dragonfly (La Libellula), a playful and radically revisionary meditation on the subject of liberty. The Dragonfly revisits moments of the poetic canon that were formative for Rosselli (in particular work by Rimbaud and Montale) from the point of view of a female subjectivity, making this poem an important work of postwar Italian feminism. This edition presents The Dragonfly alongside HOSPITAL SERIES, as it appeared in the first Italian edition of HOSPITAL SERIES in 1969, for the first time in translation.