Unearthed

When you start digging in Santini’s poetry, you have no idea of what you might be unearthing, but can rest assured that none of the findings will be less than exciting. Her compressed and high voltage syntagms move sharply and elegantly in a sea of intuitions, each one of which claims exclusive attention, thus undermining any attempt at turning metaphors into similitudes or objective correlatives. If Eliot’s April is merely a cruel month, Santini’s May is a month of “knives in the water” (Polansky docet) and the frozen landscapes that appear at almost regular intervals in her poems bear the mark of an indomitable struggle against “milk-words / [that] spoil fast in the fading light / of the process / overgrowth of sense.” In a world where writing obtains all too often below the zero-degree line, every sequence of this Unearthed is a powerful and moving testimony of what poetry can do to liberate language from the curse of sterile repetitions, restoring for us all the pleasure of seeking, and exchanging, instances of a formerly unsuspected reality. Luigi Ballerini, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, author of Cephalonia and Eccetera, E Federica Santini’s Unearthed is a stunning collection of poems that dig deep into the earth and into your being. It brilliantly, poetically asks us to go beyond having casual conversations with the earth, ourselves, and each other in order to touch, smell, feel what is underneath. This is where we come alive. This is poetry at its best. Jacinta V. White, author of Resurrecting the Bones, publishing editor of Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing The vibrant poems of Federica Santini’s Unearthed explore loss, yearning, and transformation in worlds rich with imagery and metaphors where “In the garden unruly / weed-foxes grow feisty” and “The grass of wanting has sharp blades.” Santini’s poetry dauntlessly uncovers what is hidden, from creatures that bite and sing, to recluse and rhizome bodies, and the shape-shifting compound water—“Make it rise from twisted veins / with forked rod, bifurcated tongue lapping…” In this remarkable collection, Federica Santini is the diviner. Jules Jacob, author of The Glass Sponge