Name: Last Stops of the Night Journey
Price: 20.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Milo De Angelis
ISBN: 9781962770637

Glimmering meditations on time, memory, imprisonment, human connection, life and death by the preeminent Italian language poet, Milo De Angelis

An arrow hits a grape and carries it through the air, a hand untangles a knot, a voice emerges from a stone to speak about life. In his poems, Milo De Angelis attends to the experience of confinement. Since 1996, he has taught poetry in a high-security prison on the outskirts of Milan. He sees poetry as a daily salvation; when the knot comes undone, it “carries back the sweet human voice of bodies in motion.” And when the stone cracks open, a voice tells of you and of me, a shared story. De Angelis never shies from the deep fears, darkness, and indeterminacy of incarceration. The characters of these poems wonder whether they will survive. They know all that stays hidden in an end, and they plan for their salvation. Milo De Angelis’s language is ancient and new, transcendent, and urgent. Last Stops of the Night Journey pulses with the immensity of silence, memory, life, time, and fear. De Angelis insists that the infinite language of poetry can speak to the incarcerated person, greet them, know them, and chart a world beyond physical walls.

“The ghostliest figure of Last Stops of the Night Journey is De Angelis himself, represented as often by a self-directed ‘you’ as by a grounded ‘I’ . . . De Angelis finds himself becoming a Dantean ghost fit for our media-saturated time.” —Christopher Spaide, LitHub

“Last Stops of the Night Journey is a poet’s conversation with mortality conducted in a language so private that it’s always dark in these poems, and yet responsible to a poetic word as if every person in the world were listening. Doesn’t every person in the world, willingly or unwillingly, often or just once, listen to this very darkness inside of them? Milo de Angelis, together with his accomplished translators, have found simple and mysterious words that are profoundly startling yet wholly instinctive.” —Valzhyna Mort

“I found myself wrestling at times with the uneasy experience of peering inside the murderer’s head . . . This is part of what makes this particular poetic cycle a success, I think: De Angelis does not shy away from the ugliness of violence—and, in doing so, he asks hard questions about human connection and forgiveness.” —Rhian Sasseen

“Born in ‘the shadow of what we have kept silent’ and nourished by the ‘wounded and uneasy voice’ of the incarcerated, Last Stops of the Night Journey is both grounded and transcendent: at once a revelation of all the human heart is capable of, and a reminder that—as the poet says—’poetry is not on our side / but in a terrible and lonely place, where no one / remains intact.’ In this generous collection—whose arrival in an elegant translation is an event to celebrate—the poet shows us what it means to live in the shadow of the carceral, where the ‘home of the disappeared…disappears inside us,’ and our heartbeat says ‘locked-up, locked up.’ Remarkable for their clarity of vision, for language at once grave and graceful, for unforgettable images (resonant as symbols), these meditations on memory, time, and death invite us to breathe, together and alone, ‘a song of pure ice,’ and to learn what it means to cry out where there are no angels, where we suffer, as Claudia Rankine reminds us (quoting Judith Butler) ‘from the condition of being addressable,’ haunted and hurt by silence: ‘And you begin to hear, in the words you said, the breath of those you didn’t say: they are there, they are there, they knock on the door.’ Open the door to your heart: open this book—we have never so badly needed this poetry, these charged and tender encounters.” —Laura Mullen

“Last Stops of the Night Journey by Milo De Angelis is a profound and haunting exploration of memory, mortality, and the human condition. Drawing from his decades of teaching in a high-security prison and his encounters with figures and shadows of the past, De Angelis crafts a forensic accounting, where love, loss, exile, and redemption intertwine. With vivid imagery and philosophical depth, he meditates on the fragility of human connection, the transformative power of poetry, and the inexorable passage of time. Lucky for us that Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart have given us this extraordinarily powerful and plaintive translation.” —Peter Gizzi

Last Stops of the Night Journey

Related Genres

You May Also Like

Things My Grandmother Said