“The verses in Contentment represent a contemplation on variants of the title as an expression that expands its components beyond the assumed senses of happiness and satisfaction. They emphasize context and the ambiguity of descriptive language, and work as signposts meant to aid in achieving a direct and uncomplicated relationship with the world. As lines unwind, they lead to spaces where attachment is undone through shifting tenses of being and territories. The resulting landscapes require a non-conventional relationship, where to be at home in a place means to be able to leave it behind.” – Pasquale Verdicchio

Gabriele Belletti on Only You (Ekstasis Editions, 2021)

“Verdicchio’s is an amazed participation in the territories he travels, ones in which he manages to grasp the temporal modifications, the human and non-human recurrences, and the mutual conditioning of their elements in a natural dialogue of traces and tracks.”

Pasquale Verdicchio’s This Nothing's Place was awarded the Bressani Prize for poetry in 2010. His most recent publications include Only You (2021), Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema, co-edited with Loredana Di Martino (Cambridge, 2017). He is Emeritus professor in the Department of Literature, at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught from 1986-2021.