Text Me / Dimmelo Per Sms

A collection of love poems which includes both the original Italian and the translated English, Text Me expresses through language and metaphor the many ways to say "I love you." Calabro's poems often evolve from the experiences of the body: from sensual impressions, "Your cheek on my weary shoulder / the day pales, your lips pale / up, up, one more wing-beat / till we run out of oxygen"; to image, "In cold blood / the ice contrail of a Phantom jet /stabs the blue. / Like a blade in honey / you plunge your gaze into my heart"; to memory , "We met and I kissed you / already consumed by the need to betray you." Although rooted in Calabro's Mediterranean, these poems have a universality which give voice to our common burden of love, sorrow and guilt. "In the velvet of night, vision rescues the poet and opens psychic scenarios in which the re-established contact with the forces of nature enables him to penetrate the mystery of life and the universe; penetrate but not decipher. The women he sometimes names in his poems (Jessica, Michelle, etc.), are simply masks for the ideal of love Calabro relentlessly pursues, which never loses the ability to surprise him and which flows forever in his veins." ? Fabia Baldi

Corrado Calabro, born in Reggio Calabria, completed his first book when he was twenty and has since published seventeen more collections. HIs poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages and they have been collected in a theatre recital that toured extensively throughout Italy, Europe, Australia, and South America. His novel, Ricorda di dimenticarla, a finalist for the Strega Prize, was the basis for the 2006 movie Il mercante di pietre, (The Stone Merchant). In 2011 Calabro was awarded The Cetonaverde Prize for career achievement.