Poems between natural and human history, private life and death, and about the crises of our century, from an acclaimed Italian poet.

Tacitus, the brooding historian of the Roman Empire, supplies the title of Antonella Anedda’s Historiae, in which she grapples with a legacy of Mediterranean displacement and violence that stretches from antiquity to the present day. Anedda writes about the aftermath of centuries of colonization, about the ongoing European immigration crisis, and about the wild Sardinian archipelago of La Maddalena and the teeming Roman neighborhood of Trastevere—places between which she has divided her life—in a wonderfully various collection where poems of community frame poems of private life, among them a moving elegy for her mother. With wit, insight, and economy, Anedda reminds us that history is plural and that our perspectives, too, are constituted by pluralities—by events both present and past, both world-shaking and exquisitely mundane.

This bilingual edition includes the original Italian versions of each poem.

"Historiae is a book of poems concerned with contemporary issues such as environmental devastation, the aftermath of colonization, and the European immigration crisis. Yet the book's focus is always on the deeply rooted history, and natural history, of such issues, and the poet's interests extend to cosmology, physics, and classics. Here Anedda juxtaposes poems of public concern to poems of family history, including a series of moving elegiac poems regarding her mother's death and insightful lyrics set in Sardinia and Rome. The title comes from the ancient historian, Tacitus, who figures in the book as a prophet of the recurrence of violence and exile in human history"--