A Tattoo in Morocco:  Poems 2007
by Richard Milazzo.

With drawings by Mimmo Paladino and an Italian translation by Brunella Antomarini.
First edition hardback:  September 2015.
Cover design by Richard Milazzo.
186 pages, with color covers by Mimmo Paladino, a black and white photograph of the author, Erg Chebbi Dunes, Sahara Desert, Morocco, June 25, 2007, by Joy L. Glass on the frontispiece, and 12 drawings, 1 portrait, and a note by Mimmo Paladino.
8.5 x 6 x .75 in., 500 copies, printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy.
ISBN-10: 1-893207-36-6.
ISBN-13:  978-88-905385-0-6.
Published by Edizioni Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy, 2015.

OP IN THE U.S.

A Tattoo in Morocco:  Poems 2007 was not only written mostly in Paris, Morocco, Basel, and California, it was written about these places.  The author’s ongoing unrequited love affair with Paris and periodical visits to Basel are strangely mitigated by sustained meditations on the Holocaust and the art of poetry.  An ontological sadness permeates the overall tone of the book.

Along the way, he discourses with such writers and artists as Primo Levi, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Gore Vidal, Paul Muldoon, and François Villon.  At the heart of the book are the Moroccan poems, which, as is the author’s custom, infuse the places he visits in this country with a form of eroticism that is detached, if not impersonal, and yet intense, politically discursive and yet lyrical, intimately abstract and disturbingly familial.

For the author, tattoos are not unlike poems, often marrying image and text together, sometimes in shocking and at other times in enigmatic ways, but always reminding us the way simple numbers were once inked into flesh to proudly and perversely document one of the darkest periods in human history, not unrelated to our ongoing inhumanity.