With one of the most original styles to appear in the 1970s and 1980s, Cesare Viviani represents the fruitful continuation of the experimentalism that characterized Italian poetry in the 1960s. After the culmination of the polemics of the novissimi (newest ones)--poets such as Edoardo Sanguineti, Antonio Porta, Alfredo Giuliani, Nanni Balestrini, and others who wanted to destabilize the traditional codes of Italian poetry in the interest of a new experimentalism--Viviani has been able to benefit from the ground-breaking efforts of his predecessors while finding his own distinctive voice. In Viviani's poetry the ideological scaffolding, historical issues, and critical positions of the previous decades give way to the exploration of a new subjectivity, informed by the revolutionary impact of psychoanalysis and by developments in the human sciences, most notably linguistics. In his introduction to Il movimento della Poesia italiana degli anni settanta (The Movement of Italian Poetry in...