Inspired by the legacy of Cesare Pavese, Judith Vollmer’s The Pavese Stone unfolds across the Italian countryside and burrows deep into the interior landscapes of memory, mortality, and connection. This is a vivid, haunting, and intimate meditation on the porous boundary between life and death, the longing for communion, the brutality of reality, and equally, the quiet grace that resides within it. The Pavese Stone finds beauty in the ordinary by elevating moments of stillness and loss into sacred space.

Judith Vollmer is recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in Plume, Rhino, Barrow Street, The Georgia Review, The Women’s Review of Books, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, and elsewhere. For three decades Vollmer co-edited the international poetry journal 5 AM. She lives in Pittsburgh’s Nine Mile Run watershed.

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