The History of Violets

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Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010 - Poetry - 87 pages
Originally published in 1965, The History of Violets (Historial de las violetas) twists the familiar face of a family farm, populating the fields and grounds with gods, monsters, and a whole "foamy army" of extras. Di Giorgio--whom Kent Johnson hails as "one of the most spectacular and strange Latin American poets of the past fifty years"--locks the natural and supernatural in a perilous dance, balancing humor and violence, beauty and danger, simple childhood memory and complex domestic drama. With disarming grace, these poems leave the reader swirling about, among the flowers, where no one is safe. "There's a lot at stake here, namely the opportunity for a new generation of American poets to take di Giorgio as a model for wresting the 'poetry of witness' away from humanism's easy faith in testimony and remembering that the imagination is the organ of compassion." --Farid Matuk

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About the author (2010)

Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004) was born in Salto, Uruguay, and was raised on her family's farm. Di Giorgio began writing in her childhood and published her first book of poems at the age of twenty-two. She went on to publish a total of fourteen books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and one novel.

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