Peter Valente

Valente’s poems, essays, and photographs have appeared both online and in print, in journals such as Mirage #4/Periodical, First Intensity, Aufgabe, Talisman, Oyster Boy Review, spoKe, Animal Shelter, The Poems and Poetics Blog, Jacket2, Sibilia, The Recluse, Dispatches From the Poetry Wars, and the Verso Books blog. His Forthcoming is his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan, and a collection of essays. His Italian to English translation of Sandro Penna’s A Boy Asleep Under the Sun was nominated for a Lambda award. In 2010, he turned to filmmaking and has completed sixty shorts to date, twenty-four of which were screened at Anthology Film Archives in NYC.

Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers

2015
Paperback
76 p.

Peter Valente has borrowed, sampled, excised, and rearranged the canon of Greek and Latin letters. Life was just as shitty in Ancient Rome as it is today, and for many of the same reasons. Just ask Pliny the Younger. Taking a break from leisurely hunting all morning in the woods of his villa, he sits down to write prose. 'There is so much suffering in the world,' he thinks, and then commences to write. Pliny's cash-rich stoic hygiene is countered by the anonymous cock-obsessed poems of the Priapeia, along with stunning re-visions of Ovid, Catullus, and Lucian. This is a rich, embodied reading of Roman life, which is to say our contemporary life. A life which, like ours, includes not only bloody spectacular violence but a poetry which refuses, beautifully, to 'just accept things as they come and make the best of your situation, whatever it is.'" - Brandon Brown



︎ $16.95