ire’ne lara silva @ Rabbit and Rose
ire’ne lara silva is a CantoMundo fellow and the author
of Furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010). Her poem “there will be singing in the
morning” is currently featured at Rabbit and Rose. Here is a favorite excerpt:
“and i spiraling in the sky i
would like to die
singing let there be song in my
throat
spilling out let my last breath
be song”
For me these particular lines capture ire’ne’s search for
a poetry that sings against the violence of mute suffering and which serves as
a reminder that all acts of human creativity are acts of self-assertion and of
healing.
*
Angel Garcia @ Connotation Press
Poet, educator and CantoMundo fellow Angel Garcia is
featured over at Connotation Press with a number of poems, among them is “Untitled.” With its lyrical
and narrative exploration of pilgrimage and masculinity, this poem is both a
search to reclaim poetry as ancestor and to honor it by remembering what is
life’s pilgrimages leave behind:
“never my great-grandfather’s
name, Narciso Palma, never his bones.
I’ve been told that he died
alone, in a dilapidated shack,
his body wrapped in the cocoon
of a hammock, the fluids
from his body, mostly cheap
tequila, puddled beneath him.
I read the postcards he sent to
my grandmother in search
of metaphor, and instead, within
the beautifully intricate lines
of a cursive long extinct,
discover the ghost of a man
who abandoned his children in
search of words”
I come out of this poems surprised and startled by where
it has taken me but also assured by a poet who reminds me that poetry’s primary
concern is life—a force that pushes the poet’s hand “trembling across the
page.”
*
Lucas de Lima @ Counterstrike
Born in Brazil and raised across the Americas, Lucas de
Lima is a contributor to the multi-author blog Montevidayo.com and the author of the chapbook GHOSTLINES
(radioactivemoat, 2012), an excerpt from that chapbook is currently
featured at Culturestrike.
De Lima writes in GHOSTLINES “ These poems mythify
the alligator attack that killed my dearest friend in 2006. To write this
book—to inscribe myself into its bloodstained ecology—I have to become a bird.”
What does myth do to Ana Maria—the “dear friend” in these poems—what does it do
to the speaker, to the alligator? In this transfiguration of man and woman, of
bird and reptile the reader finds herself lost in a narrative that challenges
the ways in which we conceive of our bodies and those with the power to
conceive the myths that transfix the bodily conditions of others (from “I
FLY INTO GOD’S FACE”):
& ASK HIM ABOUT MY DEAD BEST
FRIEND
THE ALLIGATOR IS ON THE SIDE OF
THE ROAD WHEN I’M IN THE MIDDLE OF
THE HIGHWAY
I FEEL CONTIGUOUS WITH THE
LANDSCAPE
LIKE ANY FLATTENED BIRD WHO
SNEEZES BACK TO LIFE AFTER GETTING RUN
OVER BY A TRUCK
I AM LEARNING TO STRAIGHTEN MY
SPINE
*
Rosa Alcalá @
Academy of American Poets
Rosa Alcalá’s poem “At Hobby Lobby” is currently featured
at The Academy of American Poets. Reading Rosa’s poem immediately brought me
back to November of last year, when Latino/a
Poetry Now was kicked off at Harvard University with a reading featuring,
Eduardo C. Corral, Aracelis Girmay and Rosa
Alcalá. Prior to that reading Carmen Giménez Smith and Joyelle McSweeney
graciously profiled
Rosa’s collection of poems Undocumentaries
(Shearsman, 2010) (Carmen with an interview and Joyelle with a book review)
for Letras Latinas Blog. In that interview Rosa reflected on the concept of
labor and class and the larger themes evoked by the title of Undocumentaries: “When I started this
book, I wanted to write about factory work because suddenly, as a first-year
tenure track assistant professor, I knew no one who worked in a factory ….I
also started to think about the difference between documentary
films/historiography and the lyric poem, how one comes to represent the archive
and how the other gathers what is left on the cutting room floor. I wanted the
book to in some ways bring together both of those impulses….”
Here is a favorite moments from “At Hobby Lobby” that
“bring together” the poet’s lyricism with the historiographer’s documentation:
“My
mother kneeled down against her client and cut threads from buttons with her
teeth,
inquiring with a finger in
the band if it cut into the waist. Or pulled a hem down to a calf
to cool a husband's collar. I can see this in my sleep
and among notions. My bed was inches
from the sewing
machine, a dress on the chair forever weeping its luminescent frays.”
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