Almost Love, 48

Poems that revolve around "love." Pierre Lepori's Almost Love (Quasi Amore) contains forty-five short stanzas, reminiscent of a lyric tradition extending from the Greek elegiac poets, such as Sappho and Mimnermus, to the Italian poet, Sandro Penna. The poems revolve around the word "love" as compared to the precariousness of life and the incompleteness of language, thus generating new images in a poetry that is corporeal, homoerotic, reified, and at the same time ethereal. As Lepori writes, "There are forms of love - both physical and spiritual - that escape the events of what we call reality by convention."