Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini

(Princeton University Press) Alda Merini, one of Italy’s most beloved living poets, has won numerous national literary prizes and has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize. The lyrics, meditations, and aphorisms in Susan Stewart’s translation span 50 years, from Merini’s first books in the 1950s to an unpublished poem from 2001. The translation also features the original Italian on facing pages, a critical introduction, and explanatory notes. Stewart is an English professor at Princeton University.