The renowned Italian poet Valerio Magrelli has forged a unique approach for exploring the subtleties of language, a poetry of perception that takes the measure of its own veerings, "the exact degree / of deviation." His poems are histories of the inner life that turn into X-rays of the urban and the global, and press the intelligence into the service of the senses. Magrelli's poems condense the abstract and the intensely physical, subjecting modern experience to a minute and naked scrutiny. Not since Eugenio Montale has a poet brought together in one voice so many strands of the Italian...