On Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep

by Taylor Yoonji Kang. “You are a stranger here” declares the opening poem of Amelia Rosselli’s slim volume Sleep (2023), “and have no place among us.” This address comes between invocations of the “cool sweet fragrance” of “burnt” incense, of the work of “fat” and “tender” hands letting a hatchet cut “slittingly” into flesh-like dirt, of souls absconding to meet their “Maker” as fuel burns without end on earth—all antinomies that call to mind the Petrarchan tropes of waking and dozing, freezing and burning, falling and flight.