The Meaning of Life Is to Fight: A Collection Of Poems

I am grateful to those who abandoned and betrayed my soul.
They unwillingly taught me how to survive and thrive alone.

The Meaning of Life Is to Fight is a short collection of philosophical poetry whose central problem is the relation between meaning and struggle.

Fight, as the book uses the word, names the preservation of agency under pressure. Gravity is the pull of opposition. Time is the loss of possibility. The meaning of life appears in the act of resisting reduction, while still taking responsibility for what one becomes.

That thought governs the poems. Injury becomes material for character. Error remains more honest than the fear that prevents action. Comfort is judged by what it does to strength. Technology is judged by what it does to attention and dependence.

The poems are brief because their force depends on compression. A poem ends before it explains itself, leaving the reader with a claim to judge rather than a mood to consume.

Meaning appears when life confronts the forces that would reduce it.

Ivan Catanzaro is an Italian writer with an academic background in philosophy. Born in Brescia in 1998, he studied philosophy at the Università del Salento and later at the Universität zu Köln. His work moves between poetry, philosophical reflection and the critique of contemporary culture.