My Lorenzo

Poetry. Translated from the French by Andrew Zawacki. Introduction by Jennifer Moxley. MY LORENZO is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation on the fifteenth-century Italian statesman, art patron, and poet Lorenzo de Medici. Obliquely narrated, it telescopes historic depth into intimacy. And it is as concerned with physical arrangement as it is with linguistic ambiguity and matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. Reading the book with its purposely tableau-like shape is akin...
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Poetry. Translated from the French by Andrew Zawacki. Introduction by Jennifer Moxley. MY LORENZO is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation on the fifteenth-century Italian statesman, art patron, and poet Lorenzo de Medici. Obliquely narrated, it telescopes historic depth into intimacy. And it is as concerned with physical arrangement as it is with linguistic ambiguity and matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. Reading the book with its purposely tableau-like shape is akin to touring the Uffizi, its Renaissance paintings hung meticulously along otherwise blank walls.

In the lineage of Jacques Roubaud and of Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers for its conceptual and numerical constraint, MY LORENZO however combines traditional form with an unapologetically modern idiom that shuttles vertiginously between theoryspeak and speakeasy slang.