The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodward. Amelia Rosselli, whose heroic, anti-fascist father was assassinated by Mussolini's henchmen when she was seven years old, grew up in the cities of Europe and in America as the "daughter with a devastated heart." In fierce and incandescent verse that draws upon the French and English she learned in exile, Rosselli expresses the pain, irony and deep emotion of a traumatized spirit; she committed suicide in 1996. Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was the daughter of a hero of the anti-Mussolini Resistance who was assassinated in Normandy when she was seven years old. Thereafter she spent her life in exile in Europe and in America, losing her mother and never fully recovering from her trauma. She learned French and English in addition to Italian, translated, studied music and wrote poetry characterized by sharp emotion, deep trauma and an ironic regard for "the human spectrum." She published nine collections of verse in her lifetime.