Almost Love
Corporeal, homoerotic, reified and ethereal.
Pierre Lepori’s Almost Love (Quasi Amore) contains forty-five short stanzas, reminiscent of a lyric tradition extending from the Greek elegiac poets, such as Sappho and Mimnermus, to the Italian poet, Sandro Penna. The poems revolve around the word “love” as compared to the precariousness of life and the incompleteness of language, thus generating new images in a poetry that is corporeal, homoerotic, reified and at the same time ethereal. As Lepori writes, “There are forms of love – both physical and spiritual – that escape the events of what we call reality by convention.”
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, filmmaker and author of twelve books, including a translation of Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout (Commune Editions, 2017), which received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. His most recent book is Essays on the Peripheries (Punctum books, 2021) and forthcoming is his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2022) and his translation of Gérard de Nerval, The Illuminated (Wakefield Press, 2021) He is presently working on editing a book on the filmmaker, Harry Smith.
