Slashing Sounds

"In poems that often take the form of lists and intimacies, the author, a translator herself, is translated with purposeful style." * Poetry Northwest *
“Slashing Sounds introduces to English-language readers a gloriously guttural voice that will change how you think about twentieth-century Italian poetry. Theis handles Insana’s explosions of Sicilian dialect and Latin phrases, as well as her inventions, digressions, crystalline assertions, and curses, with playfulness and keen attention. This book is a jagged and thrilling serenade ‘against the dark sad wind.’” -- Stefania Heim, author of "A Table That Goes On for Miles"
“Insana was a wild, difficult poet—a self-inventing alchemist, a vulgar-tongued classicist—who has finally found a translator up to the task of bringing her into English. ‘Translation is not loss,’ asserts Theis in her dazzling translator’s note: ‘It is joyful accumulation.’ And Slashing Sounds is her proof.” -- Geoffrey Brock, author of "After"
"Insana describes translation as the 'entrance into another’s workshop,' and with Slashing Sounds translator Theis emerges from Insana's atelier armed with rare treasure, forged of gems and dung, boiled lexemes and holophrasis, marionettes and rusty nails, busted balls and perfumed nooses. This first collection in English captures Insana's acerbic wit as she lashes out at the constraints of convention and received belief, a necessary addition to the limited chorus of Italian women's voices in English: 'don't accept the power / that shits in the mouth of reason.' The unsettling quality of Insana's language is fueled by tension among her tongues—colloquial spoken Sicilian clashing with learned Italian and occasional Latin and Greek phrases. Insana's rants and insults also embody a spirit of performance, and Theis has proven a brilliant interprete of her work, in the many meanings of that Italian word: performer, translator, messenger.” -- Olivia E. Sears, translator of "Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms," by Ardengo Soffici
“With the original publication of Slashing Sounds, Insana arrived as a new voice in modern Italian poetry, and, in Theis, the book has found an ideal reader and translator. Theis is beautifully attuned to the performative aspects of Insana’s verse—the push and pull of grammatical and affective moods, the propulsive prosody of disjunction and enjambment, the jumpy narratology of scene change and disclosure. This translation is utterly contemporary and utterly timeless, capturing the spectrum of possibilities for the human voice registered by Insana’s work in the modern Sicilian dialect—the vulgarity, hilarity, intimacy, and outrage of a population expressed through its slang, obscenities, and terms of endearment.” -- Srikanth Reddy, Phoenix Poets series editor and author of "Underworld Lit"