Nespola - Anders Villani

In arresting scope and nuance, Anders Villani's third collection voices the tension between answering a demand for care and the inner stories that question our capacity to give and receive it. Crises in two relationships-siblings; intimate partners-become more than calls for the embodied love that care requires, and is. They become tests of humanness, in ways the book's studies of childhood and adolescence contextualise.

With the supple formal control, narrative propulsion, braiding of myth and memory and dream, and rigorous, compassionate self-inquiry that charged his first two collections, Villani gestures-in moments of access; in lapses and ejections; in almost impalpable feeling; in presence-towards a core behind core beliefs. A poetic space, where the loquat-nespola-fruits.