A poetic atlas child of 'humility and aristocratic disdain'

The volume, whose cover reproduces Carlo Berté's disturbing and symbolic 'NYC', includes 300 names of poets and 100 publishing houses - from the most visible to the smallest and most independent - as a result of the indefatigable reviewing work on contemporary Italian poetry production carried out by Franco Manzoni over more than a decade for his eponymous column.

It is not a mere collection of hundreds of bonsai reviews (each one 450 characters, including spaces), but a dense map that weaves the chorus of solos of our current poetic panorama. A champion of brevitas, a refined connoisseur of the word, Manzoni, a Greek poet and translator, captures the plots of hundreds of poetic collections by an impressive number of authors to unravel them for us readers, showing their DNA and inviting us to weave them with our own hands. His Thresholds are passages, boundaries, open zones of transit that his subtle pen invites us to cross.

His map is preparatory to the journey into poetry reading. A courageous, free, inclusive act of major and minor voices and publishers, capable of accommodating centres and margins, offering each poetic voice its rightful place in the sun in 450 bars. Impossible here to mention names and publishers, but this is provided for by the valuable index of authors and publishers at the end of the volume.

A poetic atlas child of "humility and aristocratic disdain" (Pazzi), very useful today to understand the poetic word that, for millennia, has (re)named and (re)created thanks to its oblique gaze: the only tool, and more than ever in these times, against conformisms, homologations, 'tabulae rasae' of the freedom of critical thought and imagination.

Franco Manzoni, Soglie. Reviews in postage stamp format, preface by Roberto Pazzi and afterword by Antonio Carlo Ponti, Dissensi series, Quaderni del Bardo, Lecce, 2025, pp. 274