Ange Mlinko alchemizes art and life into a dazzling collection of
poetry in Venice
In Venice, Ange Mlinko dissolves the boundaries between the sublime
and the ordinary, the mythic and the rational, the past and the present.
She sees a Roman tablet, scratched with Greek script, in the waxen wings
of a bouffant bee, and she thinks of the abyss between two airport
terminals when considering Rodin's Gates of Hell. From Naples, Italy,
to its sister city on the Gulf of Mexico, or at home, in the glow of a
computer screen ("I worry / that Zoom is ruled by djinn / that filter
out the wavelength of love / and so I wear my evil eye jewelry, // as
you advised, against being too /much in view . . ."), Mlinko probes the
etymologies and eccentricities of all she encounters. As Dan Chiasson
wrote in The New Yorker, "Her extraordinary wit, monitoring its own
excesses, is her compass."
On her travels, Mlinko scrapes at the patina of the past and considers
the line between destruction and preservation. Sparking with wit and
intelligence, the poet's own lines break down and remake language, myth,
and time. Mlinko is a poet of art and of life, and Venice is a
sumptuous exploration of poetry's capacity to capture the miracles and
ironies of our times.
