A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy's gothic imagination knows no limits. Whether telling of mystics, tormented families or famously private writers, Jaeggy's terse, telegraphic writing is always psychologically clear-eyed and deeply moving, always one step ahead, or to the side, of her readers' expectations. In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an 'eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm', and recognise the timbre of a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.

An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too-she is a mass of confusion. She's in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister's unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then "marries up," but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg's very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. "I think it might be her best book," her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: "And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.

Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth's odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues-with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated snails)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.

At last, an ample English-language selection of one of contemporary poetry's most vibrant voices
Any hall she has ever read her poetry in is invariably filled to the gills. Women like her, girls like her, and men like her, too. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wistawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written "the most intensely 'ethical' poetry in Italian literature of the twentieth century." One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, "My Poems Won't Change the World" is her first substantial American anthology.
The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, now freshly translated by an illustrious group of American poets, some of them already familiar with her work: Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi, Rosanna Warren, Geoffrey Brock, J. D. McClatchy, and David Shapiro. Gini Alhadeff's translations, which make up half the book, are the result of a five-year collaboration with Cavalli.

This edition includes the original Italian language poems alongside the English translation.