Five Doubts

Fiction writer Caponegro pushes against conventional notions of Form. This is her most ingenious work yet, employing fragmentation, layering, and collage to achieve a single vision that marries image to word, present to past, and eros to chaos. She takes as a point of departure five arresting images from Italian art and culture: a Verrocchio painting, an Etruscan tomb, a Roman mosaic, a Renaissance manuscript, and a Tombola board -- images that give rise to voices haunted by desire, doubt and death. Within these fictional meditations on Antiquity, the Renaissance, and contemporary life, she creates a tension between spirituality and materiality, between nature and culture, leveling artifice to blood and bone, as the first stage of a metamorphosis.