Transparencies<\/p>\n
By Maria Borio<\/p>\n
Translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti<\/p>\n
World Poetry Books 2025<\/p>\n
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Go ahead: judge a book by its cover. As long as you\u2019re judging its insides, too, you really might as well. That, anyway, is the philosophy that seems to drive the people at World Poetry Books. Their speciality, book by book, is the picture-perfect marriage of content and form, and contemporary Italian poet Maria Borio\u2019s Transparencies, her English-language debut, is no exception. From the book\u2019s cover art (with its mirage-like visions of glass and steel) to the poems inside (which slide around to offer their own tricks of perception), everything about this slim volume of poetry (fifty pages of Italian facing fifty of English) comes together in a manner that is both simply pleasing and seriously stimulating.<\/p>\n
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Set in a world that is increasingly mediated by screens, Borio\u2019s poems span the ever-tightening space \u201c[b]etween flesh and plexiglass.\u201d That world is our own, of course, and that word\u2014\u201cscreen\u201d\u2014appears all throughout the book, playing host to its own seemingly endless scroll of images: the ocean, a flickering cursor, a chesspiece, a crumbling line of houses.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s the perfect recipe for surrealism of the type that Andr\u00e9 Breton propounded: not just not rational, not merely unguessed-at, but brilliantly intuitive, mechanically automatic, and pleasantly untrammeled. Such a sequence of images generates its own light source\u2014in this case akin to the light of an iPhone screen. So \u201c[t]he sky presses down on everyone,\u201d in one poem, as \u201cbodies \/ slide from shirts,\u201d while a few pages later,<\/p>\n
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on the retina a hook remains<\/p>\n
pulling out mistakes like silver pliers,<\/p>\n
the coarse from the smooth, knots<\/p>\n
from hairs the moment they grow on skin<\/p>\n
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Loanwords from the domains of architecture and information technology drive rods through the poems, supplying structural support to Borio\u2019s phantasia (as when a crane swings its jib through the skyline of a poem). And though the occasional sinking feeling accompanies a few particularly abstract stretches, there\u2019s always the lightning bolt of a perfectly transfixing line ready to fall on your head\u2014lines like \u201cThe cactus spines clench their vertebra of water,\u201d which can\u2019t help but pluck a mental string that goes on vibrating and reverberating long after the poem is done. In a poem titled \u201cTransparence,\u201d Borio assembles a whole bevy of such lines.<\/p>\n
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Iron and leaves, translucent, pinch a light source in half:<\/p>\n
it\u2019s captured how the hours, if we count them, fall into us<\/p>\n
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when the sea rises. The sea is before us like a vertical horizon:<\/p>\n
it dissolves, depthless, like the parts of us<\/p>\n
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that vaporize at human touch, become vertical.<\/p>\n
The sea\u2019s ahead and in that light source between irons and leaves<\/p>\n
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void of good or bad if we see it like a metronome\u2019s<\/p>\n
edge\u2014in each reflex an hour, in each hour an image.<\/p>\n
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The sea is before us, we are before the sea.<\/p>\n
We picture needlefish in the clear water<\/p>\n
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all is a night that floats on the dawn\u2014leaves and irons<\/p>\n
fall to the bottom, dawn and night meet.<\/p>\n
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If you\u2019re reading the poem on your phone, try shifting the orientation of the screen by ninety degrees, then read it again: not just your web browser but the poem itself will tilt your sightlines gyroscopically. It\u2019s a marvelous effect of Borio\u2019s mirroring syntax, her spare and eager diction.<\/p>\n
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Like the best in consumer technology, the poems in Transparencies are responsive, dynamic, habit-forming. Sleekly done up, sometimes tricky but never dodgy, their central subject matter is nothing so much as the way we live now, and Borio\u2019s good-faith efforts at verisimilitude make her poems that rare thing: contemporary free verse that respects the reader\u2019s sanity.<\/p>\n
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Eric Bies\u00a0is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Transparencies By Maria Borio Translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti World Poetry Books 2025 \u00a0 Go ahead:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-60808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}