Last Stops of the Night Journey

“De Angelis seems to suggest, poem by poem, that we move through our days seldom aware that we’re moving also through the underworld, without Virgil for guide … The great originality of these poems is that they are … an ongoing reminder of our condition … The poet shows us the strangeness of words caught in lyric spaces, syllables of living breath, but eyes that see past the edge of the life that sings them. It’s enough to send a shiver through the hands holding the book.” —Dan Beachy-Quick, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The ghostliest figure of Last Stops of the Night Journey is De Angelis himself, represented as often by a self-directed ‘you’ as by a grounded ‘I’ … De Angelis finds himself becoming a Dantean ghost fit for our media-saturated time.” —Christopher Spaide, LitHub

“Last Stops of the Night Journey is a poet’s conversation with mortality conducted in a language so private that it’s always dark in these poems, and yet responsible to a poetic word as if every person in the world were listening. Doesn’t every person in the world, willingly or unwillingly, often or just once, listen to this very darkness inside of them? Milo de Angelis, together with his accomplished translators, have found simple and mysterious words that are profoundly startling yet wholly instinctive.” —Valzhyna Mort

“I found myself wrestling at times with the uneasy experience of peering inside the murderer’s head … This is part of what makes this particular poetic cycle a success, I think: De Angelis does not shy away from the ugliness of violence—and, in doing so, he asks hard questions about human connection and forgiveness.” —Rhian Sasseen

“Born in ‘the shadow of what we have kept silent’ and nourished by the ‘wounded and uneasy voice’ of the incarcerated, Last Stops of the Night Journey is both grounded and transcendent: at once a revelation of all the human heart is capable of, and a reminder that—as the poet says—’poetry is not on our side / but in a terrible and lonely place, where no one / remains intact.’ In this generous collection—whose arrival in an elegant translation is an event to celebrate—the poet shows us what it means to live in the shadow of the carceral, where the ‘home of the disappeared…disappears inside us,’ and our heartbeat says ‘locked-up, locked up.’ Remarkable for their clarity of vision, for language at once grave and graceful, for unforgettable images (resonant as symbols), these meditations on memory, time, and death invite us to breathe, together and alone, ‘a song of pure ice,’ and to learn what it means to cry out where there are no angels, where we suffer, as Claudia Rankine reminds us (quoting Judith Butler) ‘from the condition of being addressable,’ haunted and hurt by silence: ‘And you begin to hear, in the words you said, the breath of those you didn’t say: they are there, they are there, they knock on the door.’ Open the door to your heart: open this book—we have never so badly needed this poetry, these charged and tender encounters.” —Laura Mullen

“Last Stops of the Night Journey by Milo De Angelis is a profound and haunting exploration of memory, mortality, and the human condition. Drawing from his decades of teaching in a high-security prison and his encounters with figures and shadows of the past, De Angelis crafts a forensic accounting, where love, loss, exile, and redemption intertwine. With vivid imagery and philosophical depth, he meditates on the fragility of human connection, the transformative power of poetry, and the inexorable passage of time. Lucky for us that Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart have given us this extraordinarily powerful and plaintive translation.” —Peter Gizzi

Milo De Angelis, born in 1951, is an Italian poet, essayist, and translator. He published his first book, Somiglianze, at the age of 25. De Angelis is also known for his translations of classical and modern authors, including Virgil, Lucretius, Racine, Baudelaire, and Blanchot. In the 1970s, he founded the literary journal Il Niebo.

His works have received numerous awards:

• Tema dell’addio (2005): Premio Viareggio
• Quell’andarsene (2011): Premio Cetonaverde, Premio Pascoli, Premio Romagna, and Premio Mondello
• Incontri e agguati (2016): Premio Dessi, Premio Nazionale di Poesia “Luciana Notari,” and Premio Castello di Villalta Poesia
• Premio Lerici Pea (2017) for his body of work

Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She is a poet, critic, and translator. Stewart is a former MacArthur Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has authored six books of poetry, including Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cinder: New and Selected Poems. Her prose works include On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, and The Poet’s Freedom. Her forthcoming book, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture, is scheduled for publication in Fall 2019.

Patrizio Ceccagnoli is a translator, a managing editor of Italian Poetry Review, and a professor of Italian at the University of Kansas. He has edited several unpublished manuscripts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, earning a nomination for the Marino Moretti Award. Ceccagnoli has also been nominated for the American Literary Translators’ Association Annual Award for his co-translation work with Milo De Angelis.

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