Portraits of Absence, Volume 39

Portraits of Absence is poetry of witness, of unflinching eyewitness accounts of atrocities--the devil's definition of humanity. Fabiano Alborghetti's words, unfolding with machine-gun hiccoughs and staccato rhythms, spaces where the dead drop and the living fall, weeping, are tactile, palpable, sonnets of wreckage and ruin. Consider him a 21st-century Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, with even less reticence before Horror than either of those Great War Poets. Alborghetti is an essential voice, a cry out-of-the-wilderness of our own bad, mad, sad hearts. We are lucky to have such a courageous Cassandra; we are damned that he has so much Terror to report to us. These are magnificent, impressive lyrics, unforgettable in their heart-tearing, barbed-wire-laced, gung-ho Sorrow. "I am a hindrance, I belong to the nation ... / Stripped of belongings exile illuminated the debris / the back not yet pierced by bullets ... / I am infamy: / marching, departing / head down." - George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary/Canad