Anders Villani

Anders Villani holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he received the Delbanco Prize for Poetry, and a PhD from Monash University. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, Aril Wire (Five Islands Press, 2018) and Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022). Anders’ doctoral research investigated poetry’s capacity to represent trauma; for work based on his thesis, Anders received TEXT Journal’s 2025 Nigel Krauth Prize.

Author's books

Nespola by Anders Villani
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Nespola

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Arresting in scope and nuance, Anders Villani’s third collection voices the tension between answering a demand for care and the inner stories that question our capacity to give and receive it. Crises in two relationships—siblings; intimate partners—become more than calls for the embodied love that care requires, and is. They become tests of humanness, in ways the book’s studies of childhood and adolescence contextualise.

Employing the supple formal control, narrative propulsion, braiding of myth and memory and dream, and the rigorous, compassionate self-inquiry that charged his first two collections, Villani gestures—in moments of access; in lapses and ejections; in almost impalpable feeling; in presence—towards a core behind core beliefs. A poetic space, where the loquat—nespola—fruits.

‘Using seemingly everyday materials and sensations, Nespola hums with its lucid, uncanny tableaux of ambiguous intimacy. These audacious, haunting narratives and lyrics, peppered with ecstatic punctures and folds, know what our bodies bury and hold. They ask, “how much of myself, to save / myself, can I destroy?”. Anders Villani is a wayfinding alchemist.’
Andy Jackson

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Totality by Anders Villani
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Totality

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With stunning formal range and architectural design, Anders Villani’s second collection explores how violence engenders selfhood by calling it into radical question. What does it mean to suffer in a body that also symbolises power? How can poetry, alert to the ‘blur’ and the ‘panorama’, trace this moral dissonance at its subtlest and most intimate? How do notions of illness and recovery, victim and perpetrator, rest on fraught archetypes, and what alternate understandings emerge when these foundations waver? Villani roves between myth, confession, narrative, and dream to address such questions—not abstractly, but through the experiences of a subject whose capacity to love and be loved is at stake.

Novelistic in arc and scope, lyrically sensuous and searching, Totality invites readers on a journey of self-inquiry that dredges new channels in the contemporary poetics of trauma. As secrets reveal and conceal themselves, through the crucible of hypermasculinity, and with unstinting compassion, Villani’s poems venture an expansive and timely music.

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