Letizia Polini on Poetry, Body, and Decay in 'Subsidenza'

Letizia Polini (born 1988 in Fermo, Italy) is a poet and teacher living in Bologna. Her second collection, 'Subsidenza' (Puntoacapo Editrice, 2024), won the Bologna in Lettere 2024 prize. In an interview, she discusses the themes of body, home, and decay that permeate her work. Polini describes the concept of home as an unsafe, crumbling place, overlapping with the body. She sees destruction as cathartic, citing influences like Antonin Artaud, the film 'Possession' by Zulawski, and Angélica Liddell's 'Liebestod'. Her poetry visually fragments on the page, a deliberate shift from her first book 'Macula' (Ensemble, 2022). She explains that 'Subsidenza' was built on the process of sedimentary rock formation to explore loss and collapse. Polini views the body as a site where emotional pain becomes concrete and visible. She believes poetry should disturb, unearth buried truths, and provoke questions. Her work appears in online and print journals, and she is an editor for the magazine Versodove. She participated in the poetry series Dialoghi 2.0 curated by Paesaggi di Poesia and TEN Teatro Bologna, and in RicercaBo 2023.