Christian Sinicco

- Italy -

Christian Sinicco was born in Trieste.

He published: Passando per New York (Lietocolle, 2005) with the introduction of Cristina Benussi; Ballate di Lagosta (CFR, 2014) with notes by Alberto Bertoni and Cristina Benussi; Città esplosa (Galerie Bordas, 2017) with the preface of Giancarlo Alfano.

In Italy his poems are published in many antologies and magazines.

He has been invited to different festivals and book fairs: AbsolutePoetry (Monfalcone), Stazione di Topolò (Udine), Poesia Presente (Monza), Pordenonelegge.it, Più libri più liberi and Ritratti di Poesia (Roma), Poesia Festival (Modena) , Librixia (Brescia), La punta della lingua (Ancona), Parole Spalancate (Genova); Istanbul's poetry festival (Turkey), Mediterranean poetry festival (Mallorca, Spain); Alpe-Adria Literatur-Symposium (Gmund, Austria); Zagreb Contemporary Poetry Festival, Forum Tomizza, Pula Book Fair, Rijeka Book Fair (Croatia).

In Italy he was the artistic director of Iperporti -Scali internazionali di letteratura, co-organized Trieste Poesia and organized the first championship of poetry slam in Italy as the president of LIPS - Lega Italiana Poetry Slam. He cares about the days of Ad alcuni piace la poesia in San Leonardo Valcellina (Pordenone).

He was editor-in-Chief and collaborator of Fucine Mute (fucine.com) until 2006. Since 2009, he is the editor of the magazine Argo (argonline.it), with which he has dealt with the widest overview of poetry in Italian dialect from 2000 to present day, L’Italia a pezzi (Gwynplaine, 2014, 750 pages). He was the general coordinator of Argo - Poesia del nostro tempo (Argo - Yearbook and blog poesia.argonline.it).


His first collection is Mare del Poema (1997-1998), recently published with his latest poems, Ballate di Lagosta (Editions CFR, 2014). This is a "stunning and hypnotic book (Luigi Nacci)". In 2005, Cristina Benussi (University of Trieste) writes a note about his first collection: the book unfurls between poetry and prose, visions from the life of a man "tired of a worldly representation, without certainty and abandoned by the sacred", fragments of an individual who retraces backward "the history of civilizations that have gradually lost the comforting a myth, a rite, a collective faith."

Different is Lorenzo Carlucci's position, which finds in the work a "closed dialectical game" with a "thought" that "blocks the momentum into a presumption of too much consciousness / domination."

These contrasting criticisms take on its very first work, almost a decade after the writing. However, between 1996 and 1998, welds are already evident with the techniques of poetry, a sound style that has its reference points in the canons of the Italian tradition of the twentieth century and Surrealism.

In the following years his work changes many clothes; a first metamorphism from surrealism to narrative, changes are noticed by experimentation on language and logic, by the techniques of dramaturgia and theatrical and performative writing, with an operation ranging from the resumption of orality to the deepening of the figures metrics and rhetoric.

We can talk about poetry that looks in different directions, which simultaneously opens different designs, jumping from traditional metrics to song writing, to experimentation.

Surely the experience that matures it evolves in the very first debate within Gli Ammutinati, the new generation of poets in his city, including Matteo Danieli, Furio Pillan, Luigi Nacci. Between 2001 and 2003, theater workshops with the poet Fabrizio Maurel are important, and in the following years the experiences with the rock band Baby Gelido, partly available in the anthology Il volo del calabrone (Battello Stampatore, Trieste, 2008), a volume that outlines a first picture of the design of performative poetry in Italy.

Ever since he was young, he lived in the outskirts of Trieste, built in the 1950s, close to the port, in the condominiums that house the Istrian and Dalmatian inhabitants. His family, originally from Isola, speaks a dialect istroveneto. His father, however, often takes him by his grandparents near the Prealpi Giulie, in Lusevera (Udine).

It does not seem casual that part of his poetry is alive around the strong contrasts between industry and nature, as in Exploded City (2001). This is the second poem's work, first published on the net and later edited by Galerie Bordas in 2017, thanks to the care of poet Domenico Brancale and with the note by Giancarlo Alfano (University of Naples Federico II).

In Exploded City are described possible worlds, "beyond" human civilization, through a "great linguistic invention (Carlo Bordini)" that captures the flow of a thought intensified by imagination and transforms it into verse, formativity described as "perceptive fury" by David Rondoni and also reported byTolmino Baldassarri in 2005, for "the expressive intensity that penetrates the reader".

In 2015, Giancarlo Alfano writes: "It seems to me that the strong presence of the science-fiction imagination, but a science-fiction comics, cinema, and electronic music, is evident here. Not only is this not just the modernity of this book, but above all of the challenge he proposes: to measure the tenacity of poetic language by comparing it with the most typical themes, shapes and images of our contemporaneity. A particular form of lyricism is present, at the same time objectivant (because it tends to create worlds) and ultra-subjective (because he still believes in a possible form of heroism): that is how Sinicco interprets the paradoxical condition of art to the height of our present."

It is also interesting to note the different origins of critics and poets who have focused on his work, whose experimentation seems to produce "a poetic of contamination (Stefano Guglielmin)", a poem that can measure "the beats of human time [ ...] by activating a complex poiein that brings into play endless mutual relationships [...] which finally returns, even theoretically, within the hypothesis of communication, of itself and of others, to make you feel sorrow and pleasure, that is emotion, alive and real (Cristina Benussi) ".

In 2005 the book Passando per New York (LietoColle) appears with the preface of Cristina Benussi. The book, written between 2001 and 2004, hosts a series of political poems, reflecting the three years since the collapse of the Twin Towers as well as images flowing into the media, striking, as Martino Baldi writes in his review, "the world with all the love, indignation and the sense of beauty." Many of the attestations of esteem among the poets of his generation, and not only... While the work is still unpublished and drafts circulate, in 2003 Maurizio Cucchi publishes in La Stampa supplement, but also Gianmario Lucini describes the collection as "a single great poem that day by day is being written".

This is a book with strong realism, but also composed of surreal, conceptual texts, or elaborating symbolism. “There is a poem that is realized in the climax "combining matter / blood at the poiein intended as a theft, an act aimed at claiming, denouncing injustice (Luigi Nacci, Fucine Mute)" as a "fragment of poem, to say aloud, with the urgency of the present time, of the record that reminds us of the responsibility of the history of the species (Sebastiano Aglieco)".

The poet Davide Brullo describes it as "a long, atomic, explosive verse that drags the urge to go beyond the cramped fences that sometimes lurk our lyricals, simulating a 'old and marbled idea of ​​poetry that does not exist, it is not, being poetry constantly risking and questioning its fundamentals".

In 2014, the book Ballate di Lagosta - Mare del Poema is released with the introduction of Alberto Bertoni (University of Bologna). The "Ballate" are partially published thanks to the Don Milani Prize. In the preface Bertoni writes: "The slip of sense and prosody, which still hold Sinic's texts well anchored to the domain of poetry (even when the author carries them with happy excursions to the extremes of prose and foresight) is not never give in to the dominion of the dream or the experimental, rather than that of a human, diurnal and sensitive human phenomena, melancholy grain and gnoseological background, even though the tone negates any wise or unusually mystical accent. Sinicco is more willing to engage with the vast a plot of movements of approach and distance, of dialogue and of silence, which now sanction the conjunction now of the separation of human beings, the swirling of time, the transmutation of spaces, for the effective co-operation of their own names. He is a original poet, as the original is its deep geography of the places and people who live and travel them, map of clouds and oblique lights between mind and heart, occasion and daily life".