Bomarzo - Paperback

by Elsa Cross (Author), Lawrence Schimel (Translator)

Bomarzo iis a garden of monsters, an Arcadian bower, a fugue state, an invocation, a purgatorial dream. Titled after the site of the sixteenth-century Parco dei Mostri, constructed by the Duke Pier Francesco Orsini in central Italy, Mexican poet Elsa Cross' collection gathers all these connotations under its eerie shadow. A long poem consisting of nineteen numbered sections, each around two pages long, the collection inhabits the structure of an underworld journey narrative. However, the narrative motion is often disrupted by the intrusión of dreams and memories, as well as the plural speaker's deliberate attempt to "divert [ ] the conversation."