Laura Accerboni’s fourth collection of poems, Before and after the water, presents powerful and intimate new political poetry in which words are stripped bare to interrogate meaning, seeping into the cracks and absurdities of modern life, in constant tension between private and social experience.

Accerboni’s verse rips open what is within and without, revealing everything that lies dormant in our consciousness.

It brings to mind Anne Carson, particularly when Accerboni explores the tension between man and his inability to find meaning in a reality where he feels alienated, in a city that is ‘hard’ and in a home that is never a caring place. Home is a recurring theme, used as a broader metaphor for the mind, identity and relationships with others. It’s a place that is never really safe: ‘Upstairs | is the city | hard | Downstairs | the void moans about the too-narrow bathtub.’

No surface is secure, be it the world, the home, the body or the mind: everything can shatter suddenly: ‘We’re all glass | and we shatter | accidentally’; ‘there’s not an inch | that might not | crumble | from one moment | to the next.’

‘But the slopes | that open up | in the room | have glowing | voids’: so it is not all darkness—poetry’s light illuminates, highlights our cruel era and our blindness, against a backdrop of wars, the contradiction of being flesh and giving life, such as motherhood, at our tables where we set out death in little daily morsels. ‘How many pounds of death | do we wrap | do we carry.’ Accerboni’s poetry suggests new meanings that make us uncomfortable because they examine the dark, the unsaid. She does this through a dialogue with art, pictures and photographs, images that reveal, say the unsayable, unsettle.

She ends by plumbing the depths of the sea, because deep down, humans are like plants: ‘the city | decided | to place us | like ruins | we have edges | we have moss | on our legs.’ Through this submarine lens, the poet explores the way that man exists, or rather survives, as if an aquatic creature, a coral or jellyfish, managing not to perish only in the absence of thought, like a fossil, because man’s inhumanity is the ruin of our time. In Accerboni’s poetry, words suffer the same wear and tear as man and the world. The pen gives them no respite: it tries to undress them, to lay them bare; it asks words to go further, to reveal what is hidden, to be a ray of light in the void; to show the raw nerves of the mind and society, in a constant tension between visible and invisible, a balancing act between conscious and unconscious, creating evocative and surreal images. Accerboni asks that words get to the core of themselves and things, piercing them to reveal their truth and voracity; she asks that words have the courage to embody what we are, to express with precision anxiety, indifference, inhumanity, to be, as she puts it, ‘the rough | tongue | of elsewhere’ that touches our submerged obsession to continue to live.

Text by Sabrina Pisu

Title

Il prima e il dopo dell’acqua

Publisher

Giulio Einaudi editore

Translation rights

Valeria Zito, valeria.zito@einaudi.it

Publication date

2024

Pages

112

ISBN

978-8-8062-6380-5

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Author

Laura Accerboni

Laura Accerboni was born in Genoa in 1985. She has published two previous collections of poetry: Attorno a ciò che non è stato (Edizioni del Leone 2010) and La parte dell’annegato (nottetempo 2016). With Einaudi, she has published Acqua acqua fuoco (2020).