Julia
Cohen reviews Carmen Giménez
Smith’s The
City She Was
Carmen Giménez Smith’s The
City She Was (University of Colorado Press, 2011) is currently featured at
Jacket 2 in a book review by Julia Cohen. Carmen Giménez Smith is a prolific poet and writer; she is the
author of a memoir and four poetry collections. This last July, I had the
pleasure and honor of meeting and hearing her work for the first time. Of The
City She Was, Julia Cohen writes:
“Disguises: Puppets,
apartment ghosts, hair, and costumes embody and animate the emotional landscape
of The City She Was. Giménez Smith
investigates how much of the daily is artifice and whether deception and
authenticity can simultaneously share space within this city.”
*
Textual Matters Blog
reviews Xánath Caraza’s Conjuro
A few weeks ago I had the
privilege to profile Xánath in
this interview for the Letras Latinas blog in which she discussed her early
literary influences, growing up in Veracruz, Mexico –the land of bondage for
the rebel Yanga—the influence of poet Louis Reyes Rivera on her poetry and a
sneak peek into her newly released first book-length collection of poems Conjuro (Mammoth Publications). Of Conjuro, this is what Textual Matters
had to say:
“Xánath Caraza’s “Conjuro”
is a textural salsa of clashing and dazzling cultures, languages, histories and
ancestral memories assembled through poetry, organized in bilingual pairings,
mainly in English/Spanish, yet with embellishments of Nahuatl and other
non-European tongues that lend her painting-like compositions a dimension all
their own, invoking themes of diaspora, sensuality, the subconscious, nativism,
mysticism, mythology, and fantasy.”
*
Rigoberto González reviews
Eduardo Corral’s Slow Lightning
Latino/a Poetry Now
featured poet Eduardo Corral’s Slow
Lightning is reviewed by Rigoberto González—also a Latino/a
Poetry Now featured poet who is slated to read (along with Xochiquetzal
Candelaria and Lorena Duarte) on October 10 at the campus of Macalester College
in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Rigoberto González starts his review of Slow Lighting with this: “Eduardo Corral
is the first Latino to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in its
106-year history.” A fitting sentence to encapsulates the complexities of what
it mean to be a U.S. Latino/a in the current present and goes hand in hand with
Rigoberto González’s review
of Rudolfo Anaya’s classic novel Bless
Me, Ultima and which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the
publishing of that novel and the release of its film adaptation. The film
adaptation of this too once-banned classic of Chicano literature and the
recognition of Eduardo Corral’s Slow
Lightning are bonfire-fires burning
against the political forces that seek to make the presence of Latino/as
invisible. As Rigoberto said:
“Corral presents a unique
vision of the day laborers and kitchen workers who once "slipped through a
fence like mice," who trekked "three days in the desert & [were]
still too close to Mexico." They are people fueled by their creativity and
imagination, who thrive with humor, resilience and, when necessary, defiance.”
1 comment:
Thank you for these!
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