Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue: 18 (Cultural Inquiry)

Opening to passion as an unsettling transformative force; extending desire to the text expanding the self and dissolving its boundaries; imagining pleasures outside the norm and intensifying them; overcoming loss and reaching beyond death; being loyal to oneself and defying productivity resolution and cohesion while embracing paradox non-linearity incompletion. These are some of the possibilities of lyric that this book explores by reading Petrarchs vernacular poetry in dialogue with that of other poets including Guido Cavalcanti Dante and Shakespeare. In the Epilogue the poet Antonella Anedda Angioy engages with Ossip Mandelstam and Paul Celans dialogue with Petrarch and extends it into the present.