Carmen Giménez-Smith @ Ostrich Review
Carmen Giménez-Smith is a CantoMundo fellow. She
is the author of a memoir and three poetry collections: The City She Was, Odalisque in Pieces, and Goodbye Flicker for which she was awarded the Juniper Prize for
Poetry. A Latino/a Poetry Now featured
poet, Carmen Giménez Smith is slated to read—along with poets J. Michael
Martinez and Roberto Tejada—at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center for the
penultimate reading of this national series. She is currently featured at issue
1 of the Ostrich Review, an
online literary journal edited by Nayelly Barrios (with excellent
artwork).
Carmen’s poem is titled “Are My Fingers Comb.” What I
particularly enjoy about reading a poem is that feeling of being stunned by a
particular image or sound and wanting to simply remain in that moment of
discovery. Here are a few such lines from “Are My Fingers Comb:”
“is the freckle of my nose the dimmest grief”
“Are my taste buds each tiny
current and are the drums
in my ears is
my body any currency
worth trading”
*
Xánath Caraza @ Kritya
Xánath Caraza who was recently profiled in this
book review and interview for the Letras Latinas Blog is currently featured with
four poems at the international journal of poetry, Kritya. Caraza is author of the chapbook Corazon Pintado and the book-length
collection Conjuro (Mammoth
Publications) due to be released in September of this year. Conjuro
or “spellbound” in English (with an introduction by Fred Arroyo) is a
trilingual collection of poems written in Spanish, English, and Nahuatl (the
language of the Aztecs) and which the poet weaves together to create “a
continues spell of verse.” Of the four poems featured in Kritya, “Copalilllo,”
an ekphrastic poem, captures Caraza’a
ability to capture what Rigoberto González called the “wisdom from the natural and experiential
landscapes, the oral traditions of the heart.”
*
Eduardo C. Corral
@ Undertow Magazine
CantoMundo Fellow and Latino/a Poetry Now Featured Poet,
Eduardo C. Corral is also the 2011 recipient of the prestigious Yale Younger
Poets Prize. His poem “Saint Anthony’s Church” (along with a nice and
meditative note on Eduardo’s poems and what they do to the spaces and people
that inhabit them) is currently featured at Undertow Magazine. From the head
note: “The poems… hold beautiful imagery that’s somehow quiet and also rough,
meditating on the ideas of the spaces people embody and the feelings of
distance and estrangement between people and spaces (or spaces and other
spaces).”
*
María Meléndez
@ La Bloga
Amelia María de la Luz
Montes profiles María Meléndez at La Bloga and her poem “Why Can’t We All Get
Along.” Amelia María de la Luz Montes writes a
compelling headnote in which she discusses the media’s failure to capture a
compelling form of the imagination and language that truly communicates the
injustices of our days: We may be presented with statistical sums and other
“fair and balanced” opinions but we can never imagine them. It is because
of this failure of language and the need to restore the affection that is born
of imaginative experiences (like reading poems) that poets like Meléndez
are needed. Her poems “open up familiar terrains in ways one may never have
considered before—in poignant and searing language. “Meléndez, a Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, is also
slated to read in the fall of 2013 at the final installment of Latino/a Poetry
Now on the campus of Notre Dame.
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