Historiae

Poems between natural and human history, private life and death, and about the crises of our century, from an acclaimed Italian poet.

Tacitus, the brooding historian of the Roman Empire, supplies the title of Antonella Anedda’s Historiae, in which she grapples with a legacy of Mediterranean displacement and violence that stretches from antiquity to the present day. Anedda writes about the aftermath of centuries of colonization, about the ongoing European immigration crisis, and about the wild Sardinian archipelago of La Maddalena and the teeming Roman neighborhood of Trastevere—places between which she has divided her life—in a wonderfully various collection where poems of community frame poems of private life, among them a moving elegy for her mother. With wit, insight, and economy, Anedda reminds us that history is plural and that our perspectives, too, are constituted by pluralities—by events both present and past, both world-shaking and exquisitely mundane.