Venice

- Blurb -

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.