Summary:
"My Borrowed Face," Stacy Nigliazzo's third
full-length poetry collection, contains 55 poems, presented as a continuous
flow without division into sections. Once again, Nigliazzo's poems are spare,
often only phrases or words scattered on the white page, a form that leads the
reader's eye from one image to the next. (For a brief discussion of how this
poet uses white space, see the annotation of her second collection,
“Sky the Oar”
on this database.) The
poems in this collection were written during the Covid pandemic; they speak of
the toll the virus has taken and continues to take not only on patients but, in
these poems, on the caregivers--specifically the poet. Nigliazzo, an emergency room nurse who has
worked through five pandemic surges, is the perfect narrator to take us along
on her rounds.
The book's early poems look back before the pandemic
("5920 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 11) and then they come closer ("30
Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 12), until they begin to chart, with stark imagery,
the beginning and the continuation of the pandemic. We walk with the poet / nurse as she ticks
off the days from "First Sunday on the Ward, Pandemic," p. 15,
through "575 Days Out," p. 41.
The 16 poems that close the book are a rest, in a sense,
from the pandemic. These poems are individual
reflections, like quick photographs, that capture a variety of observations
both personal and professional. "Self-Portrait as the Pink Moon," p.
42, and "Blue Book," p. 43, hark back first to Nigliazzo's mother,
pregnant with the poet, then to her mother's death. In a way, circling this collection back to
the beginning, birth and death, the never ending turning.
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