Subverses

Subverses by Mirko Boncaldo is a collection that treats the poem as a site of refusal, resisting authorial entitlement and inviting interpretation as a shared, destabilising game. From its opening gestures, the work positions itself against paternalism and poetic gatekeeping, seeking a "greatest possible openness" where subjectivity slides away from the author even at its most intimate. Formally, these poems move in compressed lyric bursts and quick shifts of register, braiding ecological unease, gendered politics, eros, ancestry and metamorphosis. Images arrive as pressure points rather than ornaments, from "chrysalis generation" and the Klein bottle's impossible topology to suffragette and partisan traces, Sicily's dry-stone walls and the cliffs of Dover flaring into "Tomorrow". The result is writing that keeps breaking open its own claims, attentive to what is displaced, erased, and unsaid, while insisting on the poem as a live, subversive space where meaning remains in motion.