Language is always about transitions, and these compositions represent transitional moments experienced with others. From a child’s first responses to the world, to a mother’s last words, from the incongruities of cross-language dialogues, to the frame narratives of lives lived within multiple cultural contexts, the words contained within these pages are the expression of a need to shave communication as close to silence as possible. Only You is an invitation to contemplate our singularity not as individualism but as communal and participatory.

Only You etches a range of poignant poetic and compositional spaces, the most intriguing of which is the space of “between.” In these poems, buttressed with a useful note on his poetics of translation, Pasquale Verdicchio offers us a look at an imagination “unobstructed by borders.” This is a writing that keeps us on our toes as we carefully cross through unpredictable traffic trying to find the way home.
~ Fred Wah

Pasquale Verdicchio’s words are clusters of unexpected silences, fruits and stones gathered on his way to the desert. He pilots a vehicle that electrically-magnetically moves entire locations into others, without there ever being a location. He transports us to the other side which is also this side. Verdicchio calls it translatio, and carries himself and his galaxy across universes that blend into one. The temporal intervals between spatial dimensions are emotionally charged from having seen the end and called it life, or as he says, ‘Loving-kindness’.
~ Antonio D’Alfonso

Pasquale Verdicchio has published a number of books of translation and his own poetry through presses in Canada and the U.S. This Nothing’s Place (Guernica) received a Bressani Prize for Poetry in 2010. As a translator, he has published works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Antonio Gramsci, Giorgio Caproni and Alda Merini among others. His translation of Vivian Lamarque’s The Golden Man was published by Ekstasis in 2016. His essays on poetry, film, literature and the environment have appeared in journals and in book form in North America and Europe. Verdicchio is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught literature, film and writing from 1986 to 2021.