Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the writing refuses to stay in one language long enough for you to get comfortable — which, it turns out, is the whole point.
Mara: This episode covers work by Adam Donaldson Powell: Italian poetry, prose, collaborative verse, and reflections on identity, the body, and what it means to keep writing across a lifetime. Let's start with the poems themselves.
alcune delle mie nuove poesie in italiano
Pip: The post that anchors this episode is a collection of Italian-language poems — but calling it a collection undersells it. It is more like a life's argument assembled in fragments, moving from surrender to selfhood to mortality, with a tram anecdote and a Sicilian myth dropped in between.
Mara: The opening haiku sequence sets the register immediately. The third poem in the Arrendersi series reads: "Il vento d'inverno / piega i campi senza odio — / nessuno resiste."
Pip: Winter wind bends the fields without hatred. That line is doing a lot of quiet work — resistance isn't noble, it's just what hasn't happened yet.
Mara: The sequence moves through love, self, life, and death as four modes of surrender. Then the post opens outward. "Non sei gay" tracks the gap between what someone claims and what their eyes give away, ending on a bitter smile. "con il passare degli anni" is the most autobiographical piece here — a long poem tracing the writing life from age sixteen through the seventies, from romantic lies on paper to, as the poem puts it, "La mia poesia è ora ciò che sono."
Pip: From survival mechanism to identity. That's not a small arc.
Mara: The collaborative poem "whispers – sussurri," written with Diane Oatley and presented in both English and Italian, premiered at Gurukul Theatre in Kathmandu in 2006. It runs across seven sections, two voices in genuine friction — one of them at one point simply says "Fuck off," and the Italian holds it without flinching.
Pip: Diplomatic translation work.
Mara: "Caro Corpo" is a prose letter from the mind to the body, negotiating the terms of aging with something close to tenderness. "La vita è un sogno breve" is a philosophical essay on impermanence — it argues that brevity doesn't cancel value, it transforms it into something immediate. "A Storia ri Dèdalu 'n Sicilia" retells the Daedalus myth in Sicilian dialect, complete with a revenge bath and a ship labeled "Navi ri li Stùpidi."
Pip: The ship of fools, but make it regional.
Mara: "ROSE BIANCHE" and "Sebastiano" are both elegiac — one about grief at a graveside, one a meditation on Saint Sebastian that refuses martyrdom as defeat. "un'apologia dell'identità" is a long confessional prose-poem about desiring what resists being known, naming Genet and Mishima as patron saints of that particular hunger.
Mara: "Imburri il pane da entrambi i lati" is direct erotic verse. "Epitaffio" asks to be measured not by work or noise but by "il calore che ho mantenuto vivo / tra me e un altro." "La gabbia è bellissima" is a long satirical essay on beauty culture and self-optimization — it ends with the image of people running on neon hamster wheels toward nothing.
Pip: The cage has Wi-Fi. They called it freedom because the door was painted gold.
Mara: "sutta â me peddi" and "carta arricciata" are brief Sicilian dialect poems — wine staining a white carpet, paper edges cut by their own folds. "ozempic" is a comic sonnet set in Catania about a tourist defeated by a plate of lobster pasta. "quando il meglio non basta" asks whether effort that falls short of what someone needed still counts as love. "Il Buffet delle Parole" is a satirical poem about language itself as a deli counter — words priced by consequence, some marked "do not touch." "sonno / non sonno" is a five-part sequence on insomnia and its opposites. "Quattro sonetti ispirati alle Quattro Stagioni di Vivaldi" renders each season as a formal Italian sonnet. And "qui ora" closes the collection with a body in pain and a mind that escapes it — "la porta segreta che si apre senza fine / dietro i miei occhi."
Pip: Across all of it, the through-line is a writer who stopped using language to escape and started using it to stay.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the insistence that form — haiku, sonnet, dialect, essay, collaboration — is never decoration. It's the argument.
Pip: Surrender without hatred. Next time, we'll see what else refuses to stay still.
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