Knowing Noise: The English Poems of Amelia Rosselli

At once insistent on their engagement with the reader and masterful in their opacity, the poems of Amelia Rosselli have commonly been considered products of one of the most original and inventive female Italian voices of the twentieth century. As the first book-length critical study of Rosselli’s English poems, this collection of essays by Ann Snodgrass attempts to place the poems within the cultural and intellectual contexts that they respond to and critique. It is a context that allows the poet’s work to challenge common assumptions about language and its capacity for expression, art and its edifying value, and past constructs of identity.