These poems traffic in the day to day living of two talking heads, Giulia and Willi - residents in the barrier island Lido di Venezia, wizened by forty years of transatlantic crossings between Italy and the United States and now made idle by age and their forced removal from the public sphere of work. Clinging like exhausted swimmers to the forgotten creeds of western democracy, wherein every person is purportedly king and queen unto themselves, they take their dubious status to heart by wielding their metaphors with mortal irony.
These poems traffic in the day to day living of two talking heads, Giulia and Willi - residents in the barrier island Lido di Venezia, wizened by forty years of transatlantic crossings between Italy and the United States and now made idle by age and their forced removal from the public sphere of work. Clinging like exhausted swimmers to the forgotten creeds of western democracy, wherein every person is purportedly king and queen unto themselves, they take their dubious status to heart by wielding their metaphors with mortal irony.
WILLI Q MINN (1946-2020) died unattended in a hospital during the Covid epidemic. For decades he worked in the U.S., France, and Italy as a translator from French and Italian into English and apparently wrote poetry most of his life; but left almost all of it unpublished. After the clamorous collapse of the building at the corner of Lepanto and Marcantonio Bragadin, Lido di Venezia, where the Minns lived, boxes of notebooks filled with poetry were found cast into and across the Lepanto canal. The scholar William Boelhower, who lived nearby and had struck up an acquaintance with Giulia Minn, found several of these boxes near the garbage bins in via Lepanto and saved them from oblivion. In one of the notebooks, Minn had written a poetic sequence, a sort of Life Studies, dealing mostly with the closing years of two people who had traveled back and forth across the Atlantic all their lives and were now coping with the malaise of old age and society's expedient neglect, subtrahend for excessive government debt. Boelhower has edited the sequence without touching the poems themselves or their order of appearance. Many of the poems are accompanied by an illuminating gloss and translation where need be; these are provided in the Notes section at the end of the volume.
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