Aldo Palazzeschi

The Arsonist Aldo Palazzeschi

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson. Palazzeschi's radical, detached individualism, at its height in the Arsonist, produces poems that retain the paradoxically affectionate, satirical quality of burlesque. The volume is comprised of twenty-two dramatic, parodic narrative allegories of contemporary bourgeois life, which the poet depicts as timid, shallow, selfish, and squalid. This vision is rendered in colloquial free verse that places the reader, hypocrite lecteur, alongside the bourgeois poet become exemplary gadabout, boulevardier, and armchair provocateur master of ceremonies at a carnival show."