Book presentation

On World Poetry Day, the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago and University of Chicago Press will host a book presentation of Slashing Sounds by Jolanda Insana, translated by Catherine Theis. With this bilingual edition of Slashing Sounds, Catherine Theis presents the first book-length collection of Insana’s poetry in English, a powerful offering that addresses a lack of female Italian voices in Anglophone poetry publishing.

Jolanda Insana’s Slashing Sounds uses invectives, fragments, epigrams, and epigraphs to construct poems that pulse with the texture of an idiosyncratic Sicilian dialect. The poems in this collection are ferocious, irreverent, strange, snarky, and otherworldly. Insana’s commitment to contentiousness, her brutal and skeptical eye, and her preoccupation with language make Insana’s poetry particularly arresting. For Insana, there is no subject more worthy of our interest than language’s misfires and contradictory impulses—language being the ultimate arrow, forging a direction in the world and forcing a turn toward whatever reality appears in front of you.

The conversation will be moderated by Massimiliano Luca Delfino, Assistant Professor of Instruction in Italian, of the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University.

A book signing with the author will follow.

Free with registration. Doors open at 5:30pm CT