Venice: Poems

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.

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 the 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.

Review :
"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