With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Herin Wooden Boats:
Poems of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, 2008
by Richard Milazzo.

With Accompanying Works on Paper by Alessandro Twombly.
First edition hardback:  November 2010.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
112 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist and the author on the frontispiece by Joy L. Glass, 27 color reproductions.
12.25 x 9.25 x .5 in., printed, sewn, and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-13:  978-88-0-905385-0-6.
Cumiana, Italy:  Libri Canali Bassi / in collaboration with Paolo Torti degli Alberti, 2010.

RETAIL PRICE: $75.00 (includes postage and handling)

About Richard Milazzo’s With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats:  Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt (2008), the Romanian poet and novelist, Adrian Sângeorzan, writes:  “In his search of history and language, this rare traveler-poet brings to perception a curious and vivid third eye.  Wherever he goes, the light of its sensibility refines sounds, images and ideas, compresses myths and emphasizes mysterious lost cities, surreal landscapes, solitary deserts and dead seas, seemingly bringing back to life civilizations not yet dead.

The poetry, fused to the works on paper of Alessandro Twombly, creates for the reader a perspective, a cinematography, of places and cultures linked by a silent desert, by the fragrance of eucalyptus and myrrh, and by an indestructible light inside the stones and fragility of time.  Where the artist is attracted not only by the depth but also by the surface of things, the poet sees the bones of the moon in the mountains of Jordan, even as he catches the essence of Syria by telling the simple story of a girl in a café. Both have the rare gift of revealing the Orient in its negligee, glistening in the sun, with the past and present mingled by the sand and the sea.

The poet’s Orient in this book is a complex souk of feelings and smells, tombs and mosques, legendary gods and ordinary people lingering under a luminous sky filled with ivory, sphinxes, obelisks, swords, precious stones and the cheapest and most transcendent of dreams.  From Petra to Wadi Rum, he walks on a rope of grass, and in magical wooden boats he crosses from Damascus to the Valley of the Kings, dragging the world from ruins and cruel reality to mystery and joy.  It is a poetry so open that it allows itself to be transformed by the hidden beauty and truth of other people and places.”

A special deluxe-boxed set, in an edition of 25, has been produced to celebrate the publication of this book.  It contains a signed and numbered copy of the book and six prints based on the 29 works on paper by Alessandro Twombly reproduced in color in the volume.