Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Translated from the Italian, and with a preface by John Taylor. Alfredo de Palchi, NIHIL. A profound book of poetry and prose in which the author imaginatively floats down the river of his youth, the Adige, describing scenes of beauty and horror, and commenting upon them. Each section of NIHIL leads to more remote reaches of human experience and understanding.
"Alfredo, dearest Lion! NIHIL offers superb reading and delightfully makes the reader lose his or her existential bearings. Page after page, I feel as if I am dangling from a kind of Judgment and never propped up by the earth. As if the earth, the river, the same memories that have constituted the earth, the same Time that has made up the earth, were your jungle, your realm, whereas we had been sentenced to the perspective of an endless suspended punishment. The prose parts, which especially reveal your poetic craft, create an apocalyptic impression in which gentleness—barred from the human race, which does not even establish its own kingdom—ultimately falls only to those unhappy animals that you embrace one by one. The victims."—Cristina Annino