author

Mario Mieli

Nicholas Benson (Translator)

Federica Santini (Translator)

Paola Mieli (Editor)

Description

“If it’s worth collecting and publishing a selection of Mario’s poems, it is to reveal a significant aspect of his multifaceted relationship with writing, which he always reserved—behind political commitment and public declarations, behind nonfiction and fiction—as a place of disengagement, of privately letting go, and of sporadic experiments with words and verse.” — Paola Mieli, from the Preface

“Mario Mieli’s poems resist categorization. Practically every poem, even the shortest, possesses elements both graphic and hermetic, deeply personal and documentary, intimate and public. They require—and repay—sustained and repeated attention. Part daybook, part memoir, part testing ground for experiments in tone and allusion, their elusiveness emphasizes that what we often strain to express remains just out of reach.” — Nicholas Benson, from the Translator’s Note

Mario Mieli (1952 – 1983) was an Italian activist, writer, playwright, actor and queer theorist. He is considered one of the founders of the Italian homosexual movement and one of the leading theoreticians in Italian homosexual activism. His critique of patriarchal capitalism parallels his rejection of revisionist and reformist discourses embraced by certain liberation movements. His books include: Elementi di critica omosessuale, Einaudi 1977, translated into five languages (Towards a Gay Communism, Elements of a Homosexual Critique, Pluto Press, London, 2018), and La gaia critica. Politica e liberazione sessuale negli anni settanta – Scritti 1972-1983 (Marsilio, Venezia, 2019).

ISBN 978-1-946328-64-9