Slashing Sounds

The first collection of Italian poet Jolanda Insana's work to be published in English, featuring transgressive poems that evidence the power of language.

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 her 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 first book-length collection of Insana's poetry published in English, Slashing Sounds is a powerful offering that addresses a lack of female Italian voices in Anglophone poetry publishing.