"Anna Lombardo's Blackout holds a mirror of precision to the current horror of our dystopian reality. Her prescient words are a vital antidote to our current insatiable lust for bombs and destruction. ...consider how the hollow/ of this century is being drawn. She pleads to the air, to the sky, to whoever hears her gut-wrenching words; she pleads for the return of sanity, of love. Come back, bird of Minerva, bird of the night. / Can't you hear the children crying?-Ally Acker, American filmmaker, film historian, poet, and author of Surviving Desire, Waiting for the Beloved, and Some Help from the Dead "Blackout indicates a caesura from which to start again, and from the first to the last word, it makes no concessions. It speaks to us of what is missing and of human hell on earth, but also of what is still possible to return to that human being who is trampled upon every day and in whom we would like, despite everything, to still believe."-Fabia Ghenzovich, winner of the Guido Gozzano (2009), and the Charles Darwin Scientific Poetry Prize (2014)