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.
 
PRAISE for Subverses:
The impression that these verses leave on the reader varies from remoteness to absolute emotional fascination.
— Sonia Caporossi
 
What the reader is about to read is something that moves away from the order of "poetic things" to which we are accustomed
— Antonella Lovisi
 
The scenes, represented without defined contours, meet and mix, to the point of giving us something that is renewed and differentiated with each new reading.
— Ludovica Copino
 
ABOUT Mirko Boncaldo:
Mirko Boncaldo poet and translator, organises trips to the future and takes interest in gender and environmental issues. He is the author of Subverses (2025), published in French by Le Lys Bleu Edition, and Senza Titoli. Sovversi (2022), published in Italian by Transeuropa, which won the Counter-prize Carver. His verses have appeared in anthologies, literary magazines both digital and print such as International Poetry Review, Recourse au poème, Italian Poetry Review. Some of his poems have been translated in several languages.