Gabriele Tinti

Hungry Ghosts sees the prize-winning poet Gabriele Tinti collaborate with the acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen on a unique artistic engagement with the furthest edges of life and consciousness. Drawing inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition, Hungry Ghosts is a thrilling evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife. Taking as their starting points the simplest of media—respectively the brief epigraphic verse and the photographic negative—Tinti and Ballen have produced something truly extraordinary: a masterfully crafted series of poems in dialogue with a stunning array of phantasmagoric images. Tinti’s verse has become renowned for its combination of rigorous sparseness on the level of diction with imagery of an extraordinary power and resonance. These qualities are once again much in evidence in Hungry Ghosts, but Tinti’s response to Ballen’s brilliant and disquieting works has also led him to explore an entirely new terrain: the uncanny borderlands between life and death.

"This book is a confessio vitae, an expression of the drama every person experiences when separated from the divine, when pushed between hope and despair, illusion and disappointment, darkness and light" In this highly distinctive artistic collaboration, Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti, the prize-winning author of the collection Ruins, has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti's most impressive body of work to date. Tinti's verses accompany a series of images composed by Serrano-one of the most highly regarded artists of our time. Serrano's works engage provocatively with the visual legacy of the Christian and classical traditions, while also embodying a very particular kind of beauty. Both the poems and the images in this volume are a major achievement in their own right; together they make for an essential collection.

Bleedings - Incipit Tragoedia is a series of poems Tinti composed in the spring of 2020. The epigraphic collections of the National Roman Museum, the Capitoline Museums, and the National Arch ological Museum of Naples, as well as the most recent funerary inscriptions, were a spur for this work that aims to transfigure our fear of death, pain, and suffering. A writing that starts from ruins, crosses cemeteries, and smells wounds, the traces of what has disappeared. It is born of a memory of the ancient & a contempt for the contemporary.

Ruins gathers a series of writings in the form of verses, fragments, and short essays that Gabriele Tinti has dedicated to the “living sculpture of the actor”. The poet moves from the tragic sense of death and vacuity which afflicts even those masterpieces we wish eternal, with the aim of giving new life and thought to Graeco-Roman statuary, to all those relics of a now-lost humanity. Through its many courses and varied ideas, the book explores a distinctive relationship with the ancient world, and with the very reasons behind the making of art. This volume is the culmination of live readings by some of the best-known actors of our time (James Cosmo, Marton Csokas, Robert Davi, Abel Ferrara, Stephen Fry, Alessandro Haber, Joe Mantegna, Malcolm McDowell, Jamie McShane, Franco Nero, Vincent Piazza, Michele Placido, and Kevin Spacey), all performed before important works of ancient art. Ruins includes essays by the eminent scholars of ancient art Seán Hemingway (Metropolitan Museum), Kenneth Lapatin (Getty Museum), Christian Gliwitzky (Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek), Andrew Stewart (UC Berkeley), Lynda Nead (Birkbeck, University of London), and Nigel Spivey (University of Cambridge).

Last Words is a collection of found poems. Its conceptual basis is dramatic: to recover the lyricism of the final moments. Gabriele Tinti has with this aim composed the last words of ordinary people who chose to commit suicide into a collectanea, a single, long, painful, moving poem of reality. Their words have been organized by the author into a kind of collective epitaph and faithfully recorded without any kind of alteration, freeing them of any pathetic attempt at identifying fictional or literary affectation. They are lethal, terrible, lucid words written as a shout, a scream, in serenity, with awareness, at peace; words that contain all the terrible complexity of life. In being last words, the end of all communication, of every vital impulse, they testify to the most authentic difficulty of being human. The book contains an essay by Derrick de Kerckhove and features pictures of people who died by suicide, taken from the scandalous series The Morgue by Andres Serrano.