Luigi Ballerini's poetry belongs to the ontological or grammatological style characteristic of a select group of poets, including Nanni Cagnone, Raffaele Perrotta, and Andrea Zanzotto, writing in the decades following the 1960s movement called the novissimi (newest poets). With Ballerini this style has usually taken the form of a poetry of enigma, composed of unlikely lexical choices arranged in difficult and often extragrammatical syntagmas. Implicit in these operations is a polemic against both the confessional lyric and mimetic aesthetics at large. Ballerini's theoretical roots lie in the alternative-language poetics of the twentieth-century avant-garde. These sources can be gauged by a rapid glance at the critical work that has most occupied Ballerini. He has written on Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams; Guido Cavalcanti and the dolce stil novo (sweet new style); and futurism and visual poetry--in La piramide capovolta (The Upside-Down Pyramid) and Logical Space , both published in...