Camillo Sbarbaro (1888-1967), born in Santa Margherita Ligure, experimented with a hybrid form of poetry and prose that he called trucioli--"shavings." Some of the first were written in the trenches during World War I. Developing the form for more than fifty years, he published a complete set of these writings in a 400-page volume in the year before his death. The selections published in SHAVINGS: SELECTED PROSE POEMS, 1914-1940 are drawn from this corpus.