Poetry. Bilingual Italian-English Edition. Elisa Biagini is known for her six books of poetry in Italy and for her prize- winning bilingual collection, The Guest in the Wood (Chelsea Editions, 2013). Her striving is to rediscover the reality in each moment, to capture the purity and pain of each experience, and to communicate these hidden things. Alicia Ostriker has said of her work: In a language that is part dream, part memory, part barbed wire, part a mouth full of teeth and part an ordinary kitchen or bedroom, the poet lures us and snares us. If it were music, Biagini's poetics might be brass, might be the thread of a violin. If it were painting, the pigments would be dark reds and grays, layered, jagged, mazelike. In THE PLANT OF DREAMING, Biagini makes further explorations, and enters into a creative dialogue with Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson.

By disrupting the paths of language, Elisa Biagini creates destinations that are only apparently domestic. Her poems often map cosmic dislocations. You may dive into water and come up in the palm of a hand wondering if you have drowned. Biagini pulls you inside of pain arising from angles festering in light and life. Like the title of one section, 'From a Crack, ' dark material and some healing emanate from fissures and small openings.--Wallis Wilde-Menozzi