Small China Moon:  Poems 2002
by Richard Milazzo.

With an Italian translation and an afterward by Peter Carravetta.
First edition paperback:  November 2010.
176 pages, with a black and white photograph of the author, Hotel Due Torre, Rome, Italy, January 2003, by Joy L. Glass on the frontispiece, and a color illustration by Ross Bleckner.
6.5 x 4.75 in., printed, sewn and bound in Italy.
ISBN:  978-88-456-1196-4.
Published by Campanotto Editore, Pasian di Prato (Udine), Italy, 2010.

RETAIL PRICE: $30.00 (includes postage and handling)

Each poem in Richard Milazzo’s Small China Moon:  Poems 2002 contains the word ‘China,’ ‘Chinese’ or other related word, this in lieu of the trip to that country which did not take place in the summer of 2002.  The author would finally go to China five years later, in 2007, and write while he was there, Stone Dragon Bridge:  Poems 2006-2007. Still odder, a preponderance of the poems in Small China Moon were written in New York City, with the exception of a handful written in Prague and the American Southwest.  About this book the Italian scholar, poet, and translator Peter Carravetta writes:  “It should be obvious that, at the formal level, the work in Small China Moon, is making a case for a poetry no longer of the flash, the spark, the overwhelming but mute image, but rather a telling of the vicissitudes of the living self, asserting itself stoically in the thrownness of being in this our irremediably alienated world, a plenum with no beginning and no end, just a passing-through.”

Here, the lyric and the narrative impulse meet on a level playing field, where the formal concerns of the poem do not preside exclusively over the ever-elusive ontological realities fueling it.  Rather than becoming the “army of language” (John Cage), syntax loses itself in the pursuit of an object of desire it would overwhelm and devour but to which it cannot even draw near, much less consume – whether this be a woman, the Other, or a whole country.  “I am still not convinced / the sun will dance with us tomorrow, / or the moon bring both sides / of the night together, to bed, tonight.”