Author(s)

Nicholas Benson

Description

“While backpacking in Europe as a teenager in the 1980s, Nick Benson stumbled on a window display in a Venetian gallery that caught his eye: it featured a beautifully carved duffle-bag sculpted from wood, complete with drawers. For the itinerant Benson, this objet d’art was a source of fasci- nation: ‘you could keep your travel bag by your bed and be ready to go, but it could also be a useful piece of furniture...I would have commissioned some wooden luggage, if not for the price tag... instead it became a metaphor and took on a life of its own. I didn’t realize it then, but it’s the embodiment of wanting opposing things at once. It seems to sum up this permanent sense of duality—rootedness and restlessness’ (Interview with Benson, January 19, 2024).” — Christopher Greger and James Penner, from the Afterword

“A terrific poet, Benson’s poems range from a kind of Whitmanesque vision as he tries to visit an old Jewish graveyard in NY to intense lyrics that as he says in one poem, would ‘rescue your breaking heart.’ This is a poet and translator with a wide range of talents.” — Richard Jackson

Nicholas Benson was born in West Germany in 1966 and grew up in Yugoslavia, Turkey, and the USSR. He holds an MA in Italian (Middlebury, 1991), a PhD in Italian (New York University, 1999), and an MFA in Writing (Vermont College of Fine Arts, 2009). He has published translations, poems, and essays in many journals. His translations include Attilio Bertolucci’s Winter Journey (Parlor Press, 2005); Aldo Palazzeschi’s The Arsonist (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2013), for which he was awarded an NEA Translation Fel- lowship; in collaboration with Elena Coda, Scipio Slataper’s My Karst and My City and Other Essays (Lorenzo Da Ponte Li- brary/University of Toronto Press, 2020), which was awarded the John Florio Prize by the Society of Translators (UK); and Maria Grazia Calandrone, (°) – seed and other poems, edited by Beppe Cavatorta.

Listen to a short interview with the Author.

ISBN 978-1-946328-44-1