Dolore Minimo

Overview

In Dolore Minimo, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto attends to her own becoming in language both tender and fierce, painful and luminous. This collection, Vivinetto’s first, charts the course of her gender transition in poems that enact a mutually constitutive relationship between self and place, interrogating the foundations of physical, cultural, and emotional landscapes assumed or averred immutable. Her imagination is rooted in the Sicilian landscape of her native Siracusa, even as that ground shifts under foot in response to the poet’s own emotional and physical transformations. Vivinetto engages with classical mythology, Italian feminist theory, and received constructs of family, religion, and gender to explore the terrors and pleasures of a childhood that culminates in a second birth, in which she must be both mother and child. Fee and Malech’s collaborative translations reflect the polyvocal and processual qualities of Vivinetto’s poetry, using language that foregrounds an active liminality and expresses the multiplicities of the self in dynamic conversation over the course of the collection. In Dolore Minimo, the lyric “I” is a chorus, but an intimate one.

Author Biography

Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto was born in Sicily in 1994. Interlinea Edizioni published her first book of poems, Dolore Minimo, in 2018. This debut is the first collection of Italian poetry to address trans identity. The book has prizes that include the 2019 Viareggio Opera Prima. In 2020, BUR Rizzoli published Vivinetto’s second book of poems, Dove Non Siamo Stati (Where We Have Not Been). Vivinetto lives in Rome, where she graduated from Sapienza University with a degree in modern philology. Dora Malech’s most recent books of poetry are Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020) and Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her honors include a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Writer’s Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review. Gabriella Fee’s poetry appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, The Common, Guesthouse, Sprung Formal, Levee Magazine, LETTERS, The American Literary Review (2019 Prize for Poetry), and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where they received the Elizabeth K. Moser Fund for Poetry Studies Fellowship and the Benjamin J. Sankey Fellowship in Poetry. They are a fellow with the Postdoctoral Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.