Celebration for Deborah Woodard’s Hospital Series

Join Deborah Woodard and guest presenters in celebrating the release of the first complete English translation (in collaboration with Roberta Antognini and Giuseppe Leporace) of Amelia Rosselli’s second collection, Hospital Series. Portions of the reading will be bilingual. Guest presenters include Kevin Craft, Melanie Noel, Dario de Pasquale, Robert Mittenthal, Suma Subramanium, Marianne Weltmann, Carolyne Wright, and Corrina Wycoff.

Roberta Antognini writes:

Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid-1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.

Deborah Woodard is the author of Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013), Filter, Handsome, Kritya, Gargoyle, Poetry Northwest, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, Shake the Tree, Spiral Orb, Zoland Poetry, and elsewhere. She has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from the Italian: The Dragonfly, A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981 (Chelsea Editions, 2009) and Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015). Selections from her translation of Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary are forthcoming from Two Lines. She holds an MFA in poetry from University of California–Irvine and a PhD in Literature from the University of Washington.