[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_36

Hospital series, Amelia Rosselli, 1963 - 1965

“Hospital Series” is a collection of poems that the author edited in the layout and in the font choice. For Rosselli, the emptiness around her poetry mattered as much as the poetry itself.

After the first edition, not all publishers respected this imperative in print, probably not recognizing it as crucial for its fruition or not understanding it. It's a shame we cannot read the page as the author created it, especially Roselli's verses, which are so musical and free to swim in space like notes escaping from the pentagram.

Rosselli said that there were poets of discovery and poets of renewal. Instead, she was the poet of research because she was constantly looking for something new and a new way to say it. “The heart thinks,” she writes in one poem, “nothing can stop it from thinking.” Pause. “The heart is good; I can't drive the rhino anymore.” She continues, "If winning the war is an honor, then winning the heart is revenge."

The images created by her verses are powerful, sometimes cumbersome.

They need space. Unfortunately, neither on the page nor in History was space given to Amelia Rosselli.