Antonio Porta
Kisses,
Dreams & Other Infidelities
Translated from the Italian, with
an Afterword by Anthony Molino
ISBN 1-879378-49-3 (paper)
151 pages, $15
Click here for book excerpt.
2005 Winner of a Gradiva
Award for Poetry
by the National Association for
the Advancement of Psychoanalysis
This volume combines two separate books by Antonio Porta (1935-1989), one of the most original and provocative writers of modern Italy. The first book is Kisses from Another Dream, a series of tough poetic commentaries, uninhibited and sometimes shocking. The second is Dreams & Other Infidelities, a collection of dreamlike, surrealistic stories.The two works, written and originally published close together, exemplify the author's search for meaning and authenticity through language, imagination and fantasy. In his monumental study, The Western Canon, Harold Blook lists Kisses from Another Dream as one of the influential books of recent 20-century Italian literature.
Reviews
"Porta's stories question the conventional wisdom of the story itself; part autobiographical dream, Part erotic rumination, part historical record, part nostalgic remembrance, part theoretical assertion, they belong everywhere and nowhere... Turning the world inside out, dancing wildly in the face of death, and ultimately rejecting the tomb: reader, these are the tasks [Porta has] chosen for you."
~ Kevin Carollo, Rain Taxi
"Whether he writes about the political climate of Italiy in 1976, or about love and relationships, whether he writes in dreamlike or concrete images, he achieves his goal, and the translator honors it." ~ B. Lynn Goodwin, Small Press Review, Vol. 10
"These poems and stories evidence Porta's relentless need to communicate directly and incisively, offering testimony to some of the most dramatic years in Italian history..."
~ Niva Lorenzini, University of Bologna
"In Porta's works, writing becomes a linguistic and existential journey marked by tension and restlessness. Literature is conceived as an open and endless project, a work in progress in which the exploration of language and the inquisitive gze on the world always coincide."
~ John Picchione, York University
I'm halfway up the ladder when I see the glowing handkerchief floating before me. I continue up the stairs and so does the kerchief of light, always keeping the self-same distance. As I slip under the covers, the wispy handkerchief settles on my pillow, next to my right cheek, and has me thinking that now I won't be able to see or imagine anything, and that I'll never fall asleep. To the contrary, though, I mindlessly close my eyes, quickly immersed in a reality akin to the everyday, but new at the same time, as always happens in dreams to people like me who, while they dream observe themselves dreaming, and wonder what is happening, but never find an answer.
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