ARRIVI, CITAZIONI E ALTRO.
https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B0BZLB5CKB/
Pls note: the book is in Italian.
This is a somewhat particular book that does not easily allow itself to be defined. Put simply, it is a collection of fifty, say writings, half short stories or essays and half poems, plus a dozen or so riddles (or if you want a courtly term: epigrams).
Are prose and poetry miscible?
Books consisting of collections of essays or short stories, there are of course many: among the former include popularizers such as Elliot Gold a biologist, Bruno Zevi an architect, Carlo Rovelli a physicist; among the latter, writers of short stories such as Hemingway, Maupassant, Gogol, etc. Among writers who mix fiction and nonfiction (I can’t think of many) I would recall Primo Levi, Michael Crichton, Claudio Magris.
But books that contain, moreover in equal measure, fiction and poetry, that are not anthologies, I can’t think of any others. (I do not know whether this is a title of merit or demerit ….). I don’t think because authors, both poets and writers, are not so frequent – but neither are they rare: from Hesse to D’Annunzio, to Kipling … Perhaps it is because poetry readers are few, because schooling has not made us love poetry, because contemporary poetry is often difficult, because some of the space occupied in the past by poetry is now taken by pop music.
Perhaps it is because fiction and poetry are really immiscible, like water and oil, and reading a short story or a poem really requires a different predisposition and different mental processes. The malicious reader might also insinuate that I did not have a sufficient number of short stories and poems to make two separate books…
I hope, however, that this unprecedented mixture will not displease the reader. In any case, a feature of all the writings in this book is their brevity: none has an estimated reading time of more than 10 minutes, and the average is about a minute and a half..