“This book is a confessio vitae , an expression of the drama every person experiences when separated from the divine, when pushed between hope and despair, illusion and disappointment, darkness and light” In this highly distinctive artistic collaboration, Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti, the prize-winning author of the collection Ruins , has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date. Tinti’s verses accompany a series of images composed by Serrano—one of the most highly regarded artists of our time. Serrano’s works engage provocatively with the visual legacy of the Christian and classical traditions, while also embodying a very particular kind of beauty. Both the poems and the images in this volume are a major achievement in their own right; together they make for an essential collection.