FOMITE

This sequence of fifteen poems (one for each Station of the Cross) is a lyrical, philosophical revisitation of a universal story that addresses everyone independently of their creed. Within the cosmic scope of her tableaux, Silvia Comoglio probes the puzzling coexistence of Light and Darkness, love and cruelty, reflecting on how every end holds a new beginning, how a flower is always about to bloom in each unspeakable wound. 

      She shows us how, through the turbulence of our lives, the Man on the Cross remains firmly on the horizon like a star shedding its hopeful light on humanity, time, and history.

About the Author:

Born near Turin, Italy, in 1969, Silvia Comoglio is an Italian poet whose writing is tightly bound up with the home in which she has lived since birth, and which has belonged to her family since the 1800s. This home is a quaint water mill whose main construction dates back as far as the 1300s. Because of the water still flowing under the foundations, eventually becoming a waterfall, everything in the house is always clattering and whispering. But its centuries-old stones are not just stones: they are the custodians of past ages that have witnessed the toil and pain, as well as the love and solidarity, of entire generations. (During World War II, the mill was a haven for scores of refugees and a hiding place for the Italian partigiani.) Nor is the water one hears babbling day and night just water: rather, it is the very sound and rhythm of time, the road to understanding Time. Water is also the source of Silvia’s phonosymbolic research, of her interest in parsing and juxtaposing sounds in an attempt to illuminate their relationship to sense—a constant preoccupation in her work. The stones as custodians of History, and water as the embodiment of Time, thus, provide the coordinates for Silvia Comoglio’s explorations, both in the field of poetry and philosophy (in which she majored). Though her writing may at times appear abstract or visionary, it is in fact firmly grounded in a present that bears the indelible traces of our historical past. There is no eluding Time and History: we move on a stage defined by the complexities of their interaction and the stubbornness of their recurrence.  

About the Translator:

A poet, translator, critic, and photographer, Giorgio Mobili was born in Milan, Italy, in 1973. He teaches at California State University, Fresno. 

He is the author of several academic essays on (Post)modern literature and film, and of the book Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, and Volponi (2008). 

His Italian poetry has appeared in several journals and in six published collections, and has been anthologized in Poets of the Italian Diaspora. A Spanish-language collection (Última salida a Ventura) came out in Santiago, Chile, in 2014. His poetry has been translated into English, Spanish, and Romanian. In 2021 came his first English-language book of poetry and photography, Sunken Boulevards. In 2024 he co-authored La casa gialla, a collaboration where Mobili’s photographies engage in a haunting dialogue with Silvia Comoglio’s verse. 

As a translator he has rendered into Italian the poets Narlan Matos, Christopher Merrill, Carmen Berenguer, and Malú Urriola. He has translated into English poets Luigi Fontanella, Alessio Brandolini and Silvia Comoglio, and philosopher Massimo Cacciari.