Transparencies by Maria Borio

Transparencies

By Maria Borio

Translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti

World Poetry Books 2025

Go ahead: judge a book by its cover. As long as you’re 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’s Transparencies, her English-language debut, is no exception. From the book’s 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.

Set in a world that is increasingly mediated by screens, Borio’s poems span the ever-tightening space “[b]etween flesh and plexiglass.” That world is our own, of course, and that word—“screen”—appears 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.

It’s the perfect recipe for surrealism of the type that André 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—in this case akin to the light of an iPhone screen. So “[t]he sky presses down on everyone,” in one poem, as “bodies / slide from shirts,” while a few pages later,

on the retina a hook remains

pulling out mistakes like silver pliers,

the coarse from the smooth, knots

from hairs the moment they grow on skin

Loanwords from the domains of architecture and information technology drive rods through the poems, supplying structural support to Borio’s 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’s always the lightning bolt of a perfectly transfixing line ready to fall on your head—lines like “The cactus spines clench their vertebra of water,” which can’t help but pluck a mental string that goes on vibrating and reverberating long after the poem is done. In a poem titled “Transparence,” Borio assembles a whole bevy of such lines.

Iron and leaves, translucent, pinch a light source in half:

it’s captured how the hours, if we count them, fall into us

when the sea rises. The sea is before us like a vertical horizon:

it dissolves, depthless, like the parts of us

that vaporize at human touch, become vertical.

The sea’s ahead and in that light source between irons and leaves

void of good or bad if we see it like a metronome’s

edge—in each reflex an hour, in each hour an image.

The sea is before us, we are before the sea.

We picture needlefish in the clear water

all is a night that floats on the dawn—leaves and irons

fall to the bottom, dawn and night meet.

If you’re 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’s a marvelous effect of Borio’s mirroring syntax, her spare and eager diction.

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’s good-faith efforts at verisimilitude make her poems that rare thing: contemporary free verse that respects the reader’s sanity.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.