“This book is a confessio vitae, an expression of the drama every person experiences when separated from the divine, when pushed between hope and despair, illusion and disappointment, darkness and light”

In this highly distinctive artistic collaboration, Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti, the prize-winning author of the collection Ruins, has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date.

Tinti’s verses accompany a series of images composed by Serrano—one of the most highly regarded artists of our time. Serrano’s works engage provocatively with the visual legacy of the Christian and classical traditions, while also embodying a very particular kind of beauty. Both the poems and the images in this volume are a major achievement in their own right; together they make for an essential collection.

Gabriele Tinti (Author) Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Willem Dafoe, and Kevin Spacey. His work is focused on the theme of death and suffering and is mostly composed in the form of ekphrastic and epigrammatic poetry. In 2018 his ekphrastic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Montale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.David Graham (Translated by) David Graham lives in Venice and has been translating from Italian to English for almost thirty years. He specialises in art, including art criticism, mainly for exhibition catalogues. He has translated guide books for almost all of Venice’s museums and art galleries, and for some years also the catalogues for the Venice Art/Architecture Biennale. His more recent work has included several major publications for the Vatican Museums. He also likes to dabble in poetry from time to time.