Delirious Verse

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk delivered by Italian poet Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996), in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on intensive literary and musical studies – and influenced by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy – Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.” Delirium here is both frenzy and method, signalling the “spatial and temporal repositioning” of verse – a turn that is also a deviation from received identities and national traditions. Disjointed yet resonant, diasporic yet communal, Rosselli imagines a poetry unmoored from empire yet insistently bound to history, biography, and collective address.

The book includes a new translation of “Metrical Spaces” by Jennifer Scappettone and an afterword by Andrea di Serego Alighieri.