By Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano
Serrano is one of our era’s greatest American artists.
THE NEW YORKER
Like archaeological ruins, [Tinti’s poems] stand complete, even as they sketch a past completeness that is, now, a far country.
Fiona Sampson
A highly prized and rare artistic collaboration in which the renowned poet Gabriele Tinti and the world-famous artist Andres Serrano have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality.
“Confessions” is a book in which the authors – combining words and pictures – express a confessio vitae, the real drama of every man when finding himself separated from the divine, when he is constantly pushed between hope and despair, illusion and disappointment, darkness and light.
ABSTRACT
Why are you calling out to me?
Why are you calling out to me?
I’m coming with my body laid out and icon-seared eyes.
Be ready to set fire, to throw me among the catcalls,
the wood, the little that remains.
That rag in the wind
That rag in the wind
must be my soul:
it beats where it does not hear,
peeks where it does not see.
I get rid of the flesh
I get rid of the flesh.
My blood ripples in a pool,
my bones swagger through the tall grass,
my words founder in the struggle.
I shrink
I shrink into my blood:
I no longer feel the thickening of the vein, the yielding,
the blocked opening, thirsting for vanity
as I am, for eternity.
You will leave my body to the birds
You will leave my body to the birds, to the wild beasts.
You will chop off my head and the wolves will come to feast.
Few will weep over the misery of a defeated giant,
beaten by you, by you who are never sated with my blood.
Who knows perhaps you will skim some lines to compose a story
on my ancient wounds, my deformities, the vain glory.
You will read it every time you want to escape the man,
when you want to quicken yourself with faithless solitude.
You will float
On the waters of the river you will float
tragic mask, obscene will.
You dared what you shouldn’t have,
greedy for charms and new breaths,
eroded material, an excess of faith.
A pitfall
The flesh is a pitfall,
a symptom, an impulse.
It is our shield of earth,
the worm ready to consume us.
It is dust shaped
into image.
At night it gets up, it confounds:
“don’t believe in yourself”
– it hisses: “you are everything
before your eyes,
et non amplius”.
Photo courtesy of Andres Serrano
