On the cover of Dan Albergotti’s Millenial Teeth, a child attacked by lightning bolts configured to look like a dragon staggers backwards (the figures come from a warning label on electrical equipment). Rarely has a book’s cover served so completely as a metaphor for what’s inside. Albergotti’s poems speak from a heart wounded by currents of human energy as powerful as forces of nature—family; religion; war; and art, from classical myth to popular song. In his second book, winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s open competition, Albergotti uses the instruments of received forms to handle third-rail topics like 9/11; severed family ties; and the pervasive absence of God, felt with the fervor of one who grew up among believers. He writes ghazals, pantoums, and villanelles with economy and grace. He invents a new kind of sonnet and a prose sestina, and uses repetition like a hammer tapping nails around the lid of a coffin.
I heard Albergotti read last week at Florida Southwestern State College, one of two public colleges in the Fort Myers area. Frankly, I’m spoiled—scrolling through Dan Bouchard’s list of Massachusetts/Rhode Island readings, I have my pick of events almost every night of the week. If it’s Monday, March 6, I could hear Robin Coste Lewis at Tufts, Shanna Hill at Newtonville Books, or three emerging writers at the Blacksmith House. Wintering in southwest Florida, I find such events more rare, and, as a result, more precious. I’m primed to listen.
The first poem Albergotti read is an elegy for his mother. Here are the final two stanzas of “Inside” (you can find the rest at Memorious):
In the dust, the memory. In the air, your soul.
In my head, the unsaid words. In the diamond, coal.
In the hole, your polished box. In the earth, the quake.
In my blood, your vessel ran. In these lines, its wake.
The poem’s only complete sentence is tucked into the final line, but completion never gets the last word. In the sonnet “Is It OK if We Don’t Oscillate Tonight?” Albergotti asks if it’s possible to stop the swing “between self-forgiveness and self-loathing” as he struggles to find a moral center in a senseless world bereft of God. In many ways this Southern poet reminds me of Robert Frost, especially in the radical loneliness he shares with the poet of “Design” and “Acquainted With the Night.”
The poem that most affected me at the reading is “Aphelion and Aphasia.” (It’s the longest poem in the book, and you can find it here in StorySouth ). Albergotti weaves details of a storm that flattened trees at an artists’ colony, together with storms that overtook his mother’s mind and his sister’s life, with questions of art, distance, and failure. Each element balances the other, as in a stanza on Dante’s suicides, “denied the right/to speak, transformed into small trees that sway in hell’s wind…./….They speak/when Dante breaks their branches, and like most/of the souls in that inferno they use/their allotted time to express regret.”
In “Years and Years and Years Later,” Albergotti writes that he wants his poetry to “…say something/to someone born two hundred years from now.” It’s hard to know these days if anyone will survive to read our millennial lines, but I admire Dan Albergotti’s work for speaking so clearly and fiercely to our present moment.