Marick Press | Creaturing, Tiziano Fratus

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CREATURING

Tiziano Fratus
Translated by Francesco Levato

Paperback
Pages: 100
Publication Date: Spring 2010
ISBN 10: 1-934851-18-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-934851-18-0
USD $14.95+ shipping

About the Author, Tiziano Fratus

Tiziano Fratus is a bergamasc-flemish Match Maker and sometimes Match Seller. His fire has been replicated in North and South America, in Western and Eastern Europe, in South East Asia. He has published ten series of boxes of matches in the country of Pasolini and Caravaggio, seven overseas in Lisbon, Bratislava, Lugano, Brooklyn, Singapore, Edinburgh, Buenos Aires. In 2010 new boxes of his matches will be issued in Brazil, France, Argentina, Spain, Viet Nam and Canada. He lives with four cats at the foot of the Italian Western Alps near two little lakes that in the coldest winters frozen. He direct the activities of the Manifattura Torino Poesia, a factory promoting new flames & verses in the region. Creaturing is the first selection of his poetry for USA readers.

About the Translator, Francesco Levato

Poet, translator, and new media artist Francesco Levato is the executive director of the Poetry Center of Chicago. He is the author of three books of poetry: Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; and Marginal State. His translations of the works of Italian poets, Tiziano Fratus, Creaturing, and Fabiano Alborghetti, The Opposite Shore, are forthcoming from Marick Press in the spring and fall of 2010. His work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies, both in print and online, including The Los Angeles Review, Drunken Boat, The Progressive, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Versal, and many others. His poetry-based video artwork has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, and New York.

Reviews and Comments

Tiziano Fratus is a Root Man living at the foot of the Italian Alps, near a river called Sangone and two little lakes, with five cats. He published twelve books of poetry in Italy, seven outside the borders of the country of Pasolini and Caravaggio in Europe, America and Asia. Selections of his poems have been translated into eight languages and published in international journals, reviews and in anthologies in several countries. On spring 2006 he founded the Festival Torino Poesia, the year following the publishing house Manifattura Torino Poesia, on fall 2009 the Poeteca (Poetry Library) in Pinerolo. He has published an anthology of his poetry in Italy titled Nuova Poesia Creaturale. He likes to photograph old monumental trees, to read Jean Giono, Carlo Cassola, Wendell Berry, Les Murray and Ernest Hemingway, to walk in the woods.

"Tiziano Fratus is a passionate poet with a clear, distinct voice and a keen awareness that history opens the door of our future. We have much to learn from these engaged and engaging poems, much for which to be genuinely grateful"
- Sam Hamill - Poets Against War

"In his writing, Fratus is guided by an uncommon urgency and unconditional faith in poetry; his writing doesn't hold back on its energy"
- Antonello Borra - University of Vermont

"Francesco Levato's translation into English of Tiziano Fratus' collection Creaturing is stunning in its seemingly effortless and lyrically precise momentum. There is no question, this is an important collection and a most impressive and accomplished translation"
- Malena Mörling - University of North Carolina

"Tiziano Fratus is a storyteller, and a very compassionate one at that. His books, although structured as collections of poems, have the narrative interest and scale of novels. He has an uncanny, instinctive way of entering other lives, and this is what gives his writing its amazing detail"
- Mani Rao - University of Nevada

"Creaturing by Tiziano Fratus is the book of a citizen who is able to look at history through its abstractions and details and find music where others saw propaganda, find humanity where others saw statistics, find remembering alive and afire, among things too many of us are ready to forget [...] This is the poet who can look at documents and see music that tells the truth, a poet who know that "death is born from the vocabulary from the syntax from the breath." Tiziano Fratus is a public poet, a man unafraid of speaking in a full voice of a grown up, something we in the USA often shy away from [...] But what strikes me most about this book is how humane it is, how interested in human moments, details of our existence, its pains and its laughs [...] America needs this voice that tells the truth without patronizing and does so in a lyric that is memorable and sparkling. That this lyric is available to us now in English in beautiful translation is a cause for celebration"
- Ilya Kaminsky - San Diego State University / Poetry International

"The book's title, Creaturing, begets further irony as we come to see humanity itself as a kind of creature that engages in all sorts of vile behavior while actual animals, by contrast, are rendered as potentially noble beings"
- Paul Martinez Pompa - Big Bridge