Visit to an Extinct City
Book I in The Argument of Time
by Teresa Carson
deluxe 8 x 11; 60 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7343884-6-6
$18.00, available now
The author's Website teresacarson.com
Also by the author; The Congress of Human Oddities available on this Website
Read an interview with the author
More about the author and her projects
Besides The Argument of time series, Teresa Carson is working on a few projects of interest. Some are in collaboration with others, such as the Unbroken Threads project with artist Anne Fischer, as well as the Art in Common Places project of broadsides which present visual art and poetry. The link above for Unbroken Threads has reference to some of the background of these works.
About The Argument of Time
The Argument of Time, a five-book series, was triggered by Teresa’s first visit to Ostia Antica in 2014. From the moment she stepped through the Porta Romana, the place had an inexplicable hold on her. Her daylong exploration of the ruins turned into a profound experience: everything in the landscape spoke to her. Back in her then-home in New Jersey, she wrote down the title of all five books in The Argument of Time without any idea of what the actual content of each book would be, except it would be connected to Ostia in some way and that the poems would exist in English and Italian.
Why Ostia?
Unlike the resort towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Ostia was a commercial center that served as the main port for goods coming into Rome from everywhere in the Roman Empire. By the second century a.d. its landscape was a densely packed mix of warehouses, apartment houses, temples (for various religions), baths, toilets, bakeries, and take-out food shops. Its decline from prosperous to extinct happened over a few hundred years; by the eleventh century its marble was being scavenged to build cathedrals throughout Italy. For centuries after Ostia’s abandonment, treasure hunters scoured its ruins for desirable artifacts that ended up in private collections, museums, and even the Vatican. Fortunately for us there is still much to find in Ostia. Today, systematic excavations undertaken by scientists continue to reveal its complexities and marvels.
Visit to an Extinct City by teresa Carson is about Ostia Antica. First in the series The Argument of Time, this book is presented in two languages.
Endorsed by Joanne Spurza
Rome’s harbor town, Ostia Antica, the other well-preserved ancient city in Italy, has long paled beside Pompeii, whose high drama and fiery demise fixed its place in literature and the popular imagination. Not so for the port city on the Tiber. But Teresa Carson’s new Ostian poem comes to us in sixteen cantos, in English and Italian, as welcome as it is rare.
She takes us with her, on a revelatory first visit to the site, preternaturally attuned to all its discomforts and discoveries. Immediately we’re immersed with her amidst a haunted, antique landscape.
Step after step through this long afternoon of a poem, Carson works her alchemy—from broken bricks and crumbling concrete, intently observed—to meditations on the synecdoche of ruins, to contemplations, through her eyes, of loss and decay, on human mortality and the accidents of survival: ‘Layers of dirt turn into layers of time.’
Visit to an Extinct City holds a fresh, personal lens to a seldom-seen, venerable ghost-town and archaeological site. It casts a rueful glance at the folly and profundity of ‘historical reconstruction’—it raises an eyebrow towards guidebooks, tourism and what we think we do when we travel abroad—and with both hands, unexpectedly, it bestows us with a kind of metaphysical vademecum.
—Joanne M. Spurza, Associate Professor, Program of Classics, Hunter College of the City University of New York
