Maria Borio - Transparencies (2025)
Maria Borio
Transparencies
Translated from Italian by
DANIELLE PIERATTI
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
128 pages
May 22, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-30-7
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
Poet and essayist MARIA BORIO is the author of two collections of poems, Trasparenza and L’altro limite, a Spanish translation of which was published in Argentina, and several chapbooks. Her latest book of nonfiction is Poetiche e persone. In 2024, her collaboration with Tom Schulz, Briefe aus der Roten Wueste / Lettere dal deserto rosso, translated by Pia-Elizabeth Leuschner and Paola Del Zoppo, was released in Germany by Gutleut Verlag. She is the editor and co-translator (with Jacob Blakesley) of Fifty-five poems by Emily Dickinson, selected by Jorie Graham and published by Crocetti Editore in 2025. She is the poetry editor of Nuovi Argomenti, founder of poesiæuropa (an international summer school), and professor of contemporary Italian literature at the University of Perugia.
DANIELLE PIERATTI is the author of Approximate Body (Carnegie Mellon UP) and Fugitives (Lost Horse Press), which won the Idaho Prize and the Connecticut Book Award. Her work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, AGNI, Words Without Borders, and The Paris Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and studied translation at the University of Connecticut, where she was a 2024-2025 Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow. She currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote. Transparencies is her first book of translation.
PRESS
Maria Borio
Transparencies
Translated from Italian by
DANIELLE PIERATTI
The visceral and surreal English-language debut of one of Italy’s most promising younger poets.
Brimming with windows, screens, and high-rise glass, Maria Borio’s first English-language collection confronts the interpersonal crises of contemporary lives caught between two worlds—one ancient and abiding, the other rapid, digital, and increasingly diverse. Translator Danielle Pieratti captures the dissonance of Borio’s sharp lyricism and clipped rhythms, creating a contemporary English-language poetry that preserves the poet’s engagement with Italian modernisms. First published by World Poetry Books in 2022, this re-designed second edition (2025) includes a new Translator's Note by Pierrati.
“I am grateful to Danielle Pieratti for bringing Maria Borio’s shimmering collection of poems to a larger audience—and for the poems’ luminous consideration of place and our situation within.” —Megan Kaminski
“In Maria Borio’s Transparencies, the language is anything but. These poems shimmer along the line between abstraction and flesh where our relationships—both intimate and public—are imagined and lived. At once surreal (bees emerging from mouths) and concrete (hair and fingernails in a drawer among neatly folded shirts), cosmic (in ‘the sharp, lunar wind’) and terrestrial (‘in limestone’ in ‘high-rise glass’), Borio’s words make realms collide. ‘Can the city’s vein have rhythm / beneath the feet of those who walk, / their obscene, transparent bodies?’ she asks. Bodied forth into a supple English by Danielle Pieratti, whose renderings are as beautifully attuned to the shifts and multiplicities of Borio’s original as they are to the possibilities of sound and line in translation, this is an exciting book.” —Stefania Heim
“Can poetry be ‘a vein where everyone’s feelings seep in’? Can poetry be what survives translation? This book proves it can. Maria Borio’s refined verse shines forth in Danielle Pieratti’s crystalline translation, which is ‘inscaped’ and ‘co-extensive with it’—borrowing Dante’s image with Heaney’s words. So let Danielle’s translation be our ‘secret entrance’ to where ‘the transparent marvel” at the heart of Maria’s poetics is revealed as unmissable and uncorrupted news—a different mind map, a deeper eye empathy.’ —Marco Sonzogni
“Maria Borio’s poems hunt the instants when one fragile human gaze—across horizon lines, pixelated by screens, radiated into fluorescent isotopes—touches another. Danielle Pieratti lofts over into English what’s diaphanous in Borio’s Italian, those shifting transparencies that, like expressionist painting, care less for showing what things look like than in evoking atmosphere and mood. Solitude fills these poems. Humans ‘lean heads against windows, lose intimacy. / Only fluorescent slivers between horizon and brain.’ Yet Pieratti is equally responsive to Borio’s urban images, those marvelous flashes when ‘[t]he sky presses down [and] our solitudes explode.’” —V. Penelope Pelizzon
BIOS
Poet and essayist MARIA BORIO is the author of two collections of poems, Trasparenza and L’altro limite, a Spanish translation of which was published in Argentina, and several chapbooks. Her latest book of nonfiction is Poetiche e persone. In 2024, her collaboration with Tom Schulz, Briefe aus der Roten Wueste / Lettere dal deserto rosso, translated by Pia-Elizabeth Leuschner and Paola Del Zoppo, was released in Germany by Gutleut Verlag. She is the editor and co-translator (with Jacob Blakesley) of Fifty-five poems by Emily Dickinson, selected by Jorie Graham and published by Crocetti Editore in 2025. She is the poetry editor of Nuovi Argomenti, founder of poesiæuropa (an international summer school), and professor of contemporary Italian literature at the University of Perugia.
DANIELLE PIERATTI is the author of Approximate Body (Carnegie Mellon UP) and Fugitives (Lost Horse Press), which won the Idaho Prize and the Connecticut Book Award. Her work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, AGNI, Words Without Borders, and The Paris Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and studied translation at the University of Connecticut, where she was a 2024-2025 Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow. She currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote. Transparencies is her first book of translation.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
128 pages
May 22, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-30-7
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
