THE BOXER
Jacketed paperback
Extent: 66 pages
Trim: 13 x 23 cm
ISBN: 9781971559070
Price: $19
In The Boxer, Gabriele Tinti returns to the ancient bronze known as the Boxer at Rest, a figure seated, battered, unvanquished, and draws from it a sequence of poems as spare and unrelenting as the object itself. These are not elegies for victory, but meditations on endurance, on the dignity of damage, on the silence after violence and the long life of the defeated body.
Tinti’s lines are cut to the bone. Refusing ornament and consolation alike, they inhabit a world in which strength is indistinguishable from suffering, and survival itself becomes a form of defiance. Across these pages, antiquity is not revived but confronted, its beauty inseparable from brutality, its heroes stripped of myth and left with only their wounds.
This edition presents the poems in Italian and English, allowing the full weight and cadence of Tinti’s language to resonate across both. What emerges is a work of rare severity and clarity, a book that does not describe the boxer, but becomes him.
Tinti’s lines are cut to the bone. Refusing ornament and consolation alike, they inhabit a world in which strength is indistinguishable from suffering, and survival itself becomes a form of defiance. Across these pages, antiquity is not revived but confronted, its beauty inseparable from brutality, its heroes stripped of myth and left with only their wounds.
This edition presents the poems in Italian and English, allowing the full weight and cadence of Tinti’s language to resonate across both. What emerges is a work of rare severity and clarity, a book that does not describe the boxer, but becomes him.
GABRIELE TINTI is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell, Robert Davi, Marton Csokas, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Fry, James Cosmo, Michael Imperioli, Franco Nero, Burt Young, Michele Placido, Alessandro Haber, Jamie McShane and Joe Mantegna. In 2018 his ekphrastic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Montale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.