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.--George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17)
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.
‘Illegals’. Their condition, their recurring hell has led Alborghetti to consider his regular meetings with the damned in flashes that (it is not hyperbolic to say so) make one think of such an exalted model of our poetry as the
Inferno of Dante.
Giovanni Orelli, Azione
An epic diary, in which individual voices are legitimized and expanded by the multilingual chorus surrounding the issue of migration, and personal geographies escape their own boundaries to form a single common map, that of humanity in movement.
Mia Lecomte, Le Monde Diplomatique