The Easy Life

The Easy Life, first published in Italian in 1996, and now translated in English for the first time, is a long poetry in prose. It collects the impressions of a lifetime, which span from her experience in psychiatric hospitals to her proverbial joie de vivre, from the fiery passion of love to the challenges of old age, from the ECTs to the loneliness of her house in Milan. Abandoning the poetic verse that had made her so famous for a sincere and ruthless poetic prose constituted of short, brilliant aphorisms, Alda Merini delivers to these pages something that is more than a testament: she gives to us a face-to-face confrontation with her entire existence. Thanks to Merini's astounding ability of mixing up words obscure in appearance with very tangible feelings, devilish images with heavenly passages, we are given the chance to rediscover the meaning of life, in a prose which seems to escape any sense of logic, yet which offers a unique exploration of the human mind.