Insult to the brain : an altogether unreliable account of my conversations with poets, mostly about dying, but also about other matters great and trivial / Nicola Vulpe.
"They were shot, transported, deported. They were hanged, or they hanged themselves. They starved, or their hearts suddenly failed, or drugs or cancer consumed them. Others lived into their nineties, one even to 103. Nicola Vulpe's Insult to the Brain transports us from the gas-seeped muck of the Somme, to a tiny apartment in Buenos Aires, to an undisclosed prison yard in Iran, and a hundred times and places in between, to join some of the last century's finest poets in their final moments: horrific, tragic, ordinary, silly, absurd. Whether it is with the minimalist Gare de Rouen, 1916, dedicated to EĢmile Verhaeren, who was accidentally dropped under a train by an adoring crowd, the lament The Poet Descends, Willing the Stairs, for Forough Farrokhzad, who swerved her car into a wall to avoid a school bus, or the openly political Death and His Kin, for Tal Almallouhi, who disappeared into a Syrian prison and may or may not be dead, Vulpe writes unblinkingly with clarity, kindness even humour--of our common fate, and brings us closer to the fragile core of our humanity."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.