West Pullman (Bordighera Poetry Prize)

Poetry. Translated from the English into the Italian by Franco Nasi. Carolyn Guinzio writes moving poems of great delicacy, balancing opposites and adjacents at once. She also writes a kind of sentence that switches mid-run like a train on its tracks, re-casting its syntax without so much as a how-do-you-do. Through the curtain of birds and insects, or the scrim made of the lives of unadorned citizens, she allows us to 'press so close to the unfamiliar' without making it any less strange. This is a gifted poet's first book"--Susan Wheeler. Guinzio's work has appeared in Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Octopus and Willow Springs among other venues. Franco Nasi teaches Italian Contemporary Literature at the University of Modena.