Venice: Poems

by Ange Mlinko

Overview

Ange Mlinko alchemizes art and life into a dazzling collection of poetry in Venice

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374604011
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	955,674
File size:	529 KB

About the Author

Ange Mlinko is the author of several books of poetry, including Distant Mandate and Marvelous Things Overheard. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, and served as poetry editor for The Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Parnassus. Educated at St. John’s College and Brown University, she has lived in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently a professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Ange Mlinko is the author of several books of poetry, including Distant Mandate and Marvelous Things Overheard. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism, and served as Poetry Editor for The Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Parnassus. Educated at St. John’s College and Brown University, she has lived abroad in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville.

Table of Contents

It is almost the new year. Almost … 3

Part I Venus

Scales and Probability 7

The Psychic Capital of the World 10

The Gates of Hell 13

The Whisper Networks 15

Ducks 18

Venus in Naples 20

La Casa del Diavolo 23

At Herculaneum 26

The Mysterious Barricades 29

Sleepwalking in Venice 31

Chimenea 40

Part II Florida

Moth Orchid 45

Once more my unholy rose wrote … 47

Storm Windows 49

Bad Form 52

In the Nursery 54

Naples, Florida 63

Miniature Horses in Florida 65

Part III Venicitis

The Elegance of Pelicans 69

Don Giovanni 71

September in the Capital 74

According to Ovid, the Hottest Summer on Record 76

Arethusa, Swallowtail, Contronym 80

Bees in Cider 82

Death in Venice 83

Part IV The Psychic Capital of the World

Egrets, Herons, Cranes, Ibises … 97

Hurricane Florence 99

Possible Sea Breeze Collision in the Evening Hours 101

It Decides to Rain 107

"The Only Paradise Is a Lost Paradise" 109

Wish List 111

The Sirens Have Stopped Singing 113

Country Music 115

Approaching the Ground 118

Watteau 120

The Mesocosm 122

Venice, Florida 125

Acknowledgments 129

Editorial Reviews

"Mlinko’s poems are . . . wild, energetic, alive, wantonly catholic in their allusiveness, often downright chatty." —Troy Jollimore, The New York Times Book Review

"Mlinko’s erudition is astounding, and her feeling for language is maximalist . . . [The] sheer delight bubbling behind her wordplay is irresistible." —Oona Holahan, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Dazzling . . . [Mlinko] is above all a master craftswoman, a poet of relentless exactitude combined with charm and restraint.” —Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"'Death is the mother of beauty,' Wallace Stevens wrote. Venice adds to its contemplation of death and beauty a deep account of motherhood at a crossroads, now that art and mortality share an empty nest . . . Venice is, among many other things, a beautiful elegy for teenagers of this generation." —Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books

"There’s something at once classical and modern about Ange Mlinko’s most recent collection of poems, Venice, which tethers formal dexterity to matters of the heart and close natural observation to cool scrutiny. . . A reader could be merely dazzled by all this surface stylishness – the way in which Mlinko navigates the sestina (among other forms), builds musical, resonant work from encyclopaedic allusion, makes bold leaps of association and connotation – but then they would miss the heart beneath it all." —Declan Ryan, The Times Literary Supplement

"Mlinko offers readers a catalog of sonorous pleasures in this capacious book." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher