Last Stops of the Night Journey is a poet's conversation with mortality conducted in a language so private that it's always dark in these poems, and yet responsible to a poetic word as if every person in the world were listening. Doesn't every person in the world, willingly or unwillingly, often or just once, listen to this very darkness inside of them? Milo de Angelis, together with his accomplished translators, have found simple and mysterious words that are profoundly startling yet wholly instinctive.
—Valzhyna Mort
I found myself wrestling at times with the uneasy experience of peering inside the murderer’s head . . . This is part of what makes this particular poetic cycle a success, I think: De Angelis does not shy away from the ugliness of violence—and, in doing so, he asks hard questions about human connection and forgiveness.
—Rhian Sasseen
In Last Stops of the Night Journey, Milo De Angelis carries his lifelong meditation on fate, love, and mortality into the walls of a prison that is both literal and metaphysical. Though his vision is essentially tragic, it offers the possibility of a kind of resurrection, through memory, through poetry, of what would otherwise be wholly lost. Poetry’s task, De Angelis shows us, is to illuminate the world’s brokenness—with ethical attention, with small acts of salvage, with naming (“the name, the name, the name”)—and to make it sing “this exile, our exile.
—Geoffrey Brock
Born in “the shadow of what we have kept silent” and nourished by the “wounded and uneasy voice” of the incarcerated, Last Stops of the Night Journey is both grounded and transcendent: at once a revelation of all the human heart is capable of, and a reminder that—as the poet says—"poetry is not on our side / but in a terrible and lonely place, where no one / remains intact.” In this generous collection—whose arrival in an elegant translation is an event to celebrate—the poet shows us what it means to live in the shadow of the carceral, where the “home of the disappeared…disappears inside us,” and our heartbeat says “locked-up, locked up.” Remarkable for their clarity of vision, for language at once grave and graceful, for unforgettable images (resonant as symbols), these meditations on memory, time, and death invite us to breathe, together and alone, “a song of pure ice,” and to learn what it means to cry out where there are no angels, where we suffer, as Claudia Rankine reminds us (quoting Judith Butler) “from the condition of being addressable,” haunted and hurt by silence: “And you begin to hear, in the words you said, the breath of those you didn’t say: they are there, they are there, they knock on the door.” Open the door to your heart: open this book—we have never so badly needed this poetry, these charged and tender encounters.
—Laura Mullen
Last Stops of the Night Journey by Milo De Angelis is a profound and haunting exploration of memory, mortality, and the human condition. Drawing from his decades of teaching in a high-security prison and his encounters with figures and shadows of the past, De Angelis crafts a forensic accounting, where love, loss, exile, and redemption intertwine. With vivid imagery and philosophical depth, he meditates on the fragility of human connection, the transformative power of poetry, and the inexorable passage of time. Lucky for us that Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart have given us this extraordinarily powerful and plaintive translation.
—Peter Gizzi
