Il libro dei primati / The Book of Primates

The bilingual Italian-English manuscript Il libro dei primati / The Book of Primates combines prose and poetry to revisit/reimagine the folkloric traditions of two American states where the author spent many years: the state of Maine and that of New York. In his reworking/recreating of these traditions, he looked at traditional poems, ballads, tales, legends, and revisited them through contemporary experimental language and contents. The result is a series of new texts, each the result of a contamination between the original texts and the author’s own re-imagining them, in light of modern settings and contents. This work is very far from being just a "re-writing" of traditional materials. Rather, it is an approach in which he re-generates the old tradition.

Mario Moroni has taught at Yale University, the Colby College, and Binghamton University, in the state of New York. He has published eight volumes of poetry and one of poetic prose. In 1989 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano prize for poetry. His poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. As a critic, Moroni has published  Essere e fare (1991), La presenza complessa (1998), and Al limite (2007), and has co-edited three collections of essays. Moroni has performed his work in dozens of events in Italy, the UK, Spain, France, Brazil, and across the United States.