Blackout

"Blackout indicates a caesura from which to start again, and from the first to the last word, it makes no concessions. It speaks to us of what is missing and of human hell on earth, but also of what is still possible to return to that human being who is trampled upon every day and in whom we would like, despite everything, to still believe."--Fabia Ghenzovich, winner of the Guido Gozzano (2009), and the Charles Darwin Scientific Poetry Prize (2014) "We travel with Anna Lombardo in the dark; nothing is more poetic than the night that consoles between sighs that fade away while the words get stuck, and the unsaid things stagnate.To talk about emptiness, about the horrors with, and without, war, about the love that remains, perhaps, we need a borrowed language, a traffic of words that if you let them do, they will not only do what they want, they will do what they must. But words carry the scars of our actions, and when the darkness ends, and with it, the hours counted on the fingers (after having buried even the sound of the soul), what will happen to us, or rather, what will not happen to us?"--Brigidina Gentile, winner of Hypatia poetry prize (2011) and Mimosa prize for fiction (2015)