Fabio Piana: “The Jacket”, Catartica (pp. 80)
A collection of poems by the author who won the Critics' Award at the 2023 Tournament of Poets.
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Already winner of the 2023 Critics' Award at the Torneo dei Poeti, born in 1988, Fabio Piana returns to the bookshops published by Catartica with a collection of 57 poetic compositions entitled “La Giacca” (80 pp.), accompanied by a preface by Cristian Flore.
The jacket is a pretext for everyday life to narrate the self, experience, and lived experience: the jacket is memory, we put it on and take it off, we drape it over chairs and hang it up. These are gestures captured in their unfolding, supported by the frequent choice of present participles that support the happening rather than recounting the event. Piana's is a poetics of the present, in which reflection passes through lexical choices that force the word beyond its meaning, altering the signifier: the jacket, in the author's expression, becomes "appalling." It is not a divertissement at all, but rather a way of defining a personal and precise semantic space, bending language to the narrative function. For this reason, the jacket is appeasing, it does its duty, fulfills the purpose for which it is designed, but it does so by evoking a thrill through the subtraction of a single consonant, the h. It's in the poem's next line—"simulating ice scarecrow"—that external perception is determined, what that moment might seem like to others. Similarly, in "From One Year to Another," the author invites us to wear not glasses , but Vita glasses, so as not to "make the same typing mistakes" as in years past (who knows, perhaps in vain).
Jagged snapshots emerge from the pages, characters who appear and then vanish, and in this way the reader's experience resembles that of finding themselves faced with torn photographs; we are called to make sense of this collage, starting from our own experience, mediated by that which we observe.
And what about love? Love is defined as something that exists, that endures, that crosses the desert; a preferred locus for conflict (with oneself and with others), it can become a gentle breeze, become absence as in "Florence," and even disappear. And so, in the end, it endures, yes, but in the wounds it leaves.
