David Hernandez @ American Life in Poetry
David
Hernandez is a featured poet of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry
(2007); his poetry collections include Always Danger (2006) and A
House Waiting for Music (2003). His poem “At the Post Office” is currently
featured at American Life Poetry.
“At
the Post Office,” as the title suggest, recounts a moving encounter between the
speaker of the poem who is trying to mail a package to an ailing friend and a
postal clerk characterized as a “giant stone, cobalt blue,” a giant “slab of
night” who, despite his rock-hard façade of immortality, knows of the intimacy
of decay:
“I know the
stone knows a millennia of rain
and wind will even grind away
his ragged face, and all of this
slow erasing
is just a prelude to when the
swelling
universe burns out, goes dark, holds
nothing but black holes, the bones
of stars
and planets, a vast silence. The
stone
is stone-faced. The stone asks how
soon
I want the package delivered. As
fast
as possible, I say, then start
counting the days.”
*
Carmen Calatayud at Split this Rock
Published by Press 53 this past
October, In the Company of Spirits, is Carmen Calatayud’s first
book-length collection of poetry. Her poems
have appeared in journals such as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Borderlands:
Texas Poetry Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Gargoyle, PALABRA: A
Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, and the anthology DC Poets
Against the War. Her poem “Commitment Otra Vez” is currently featured at
Split this Rock and offers a literary taste of her newly released collection, In
the Company of Spirits.
“Commitment
Otra Vez,” like many of the other poems in Carmen’s newly-released book length
collection, offers us a contemporary poet working to weave narratives of
testimonio that blur the line between the political and the spiritual, where
[…]spiritual warriors
pray for your country
and you can finally sleep
through the night.”
*
Rigoberto González @
Poem Flow
Latino/a Poetry Now
featured poet, Rigoberto González who was recently (along with Lorena Duarte
and Xochiquetzal Candelaria) featured in this Poetry Society of America
roundtable published in anticipation of installment three of the
national reading series, is currently featured at Poem Flow. Poem Flow is a
mobile app which everyday features and highlighting the work of contemporary
American poets. Every day a new poem “flows” to thousands of cell phone screens
through this poem-of-the-day app. Rigoberto González’s poem “Gila” was a recently
featured on this fascinating new platform.
Titled after one of the
tributaries of the Colorado River, “Gila” manifests one of the key elements of
Rigoberto’s poetry, namely what Juan Felipe Herrera refers to as a “poetics of
intimacy.” “Gila” like many of Rigoberto Gonzalez’s poems can infuse the most
seemingly unfamiliar and alien subjects, a mummified lover, a mortician’s scar,
a tributary of the Colorado River, with what Herrera calls “explosive
life-force blazing toward the boundless:”
“It's no
curse
dragging
my belly across
the
steaming sand all day.
I'm
as thick as a callus
that
has shorn off its leg.
If you
find me I can explain
the
trail made by a single limb.”
*
Aracelis Girmay @ The Cortland Review
Another Latino/a Poetry Now poet
whose work is currently featured is that of Aracelis Girmay (Aracelis, along
with Eduardo C. Corral and Rosa Alcalá were the poets featured in installment one
of this national reading series). Her two poems “When They Ask Me My Name” and
“(making You a House Upon My Leaving)” are currently featured at the Cortland
Review.
In
“When They Ask Me My Name,” the speaker of the poem declares: “I am a city.” A
city that “hums electric as an exposed nerve.” Here is a speaker that is both
shedding pieces of the self while at the same time acquiring pieces of the
world: “I am here,” the pieces of that city declare, “having been thrown to the
dogs/ & pigeons, I am the dogs & pigeons.” Here is a perpetual of lesson
of loss and life:
“My life is very long. But short
compared
to the turtle's, the stone's. I am
both
the bird whose chest flashes red
at the window, & the cats below
screaming Return to me.”
*
Rich Villar @ Thrush Poetry Journal
Rich Villar’s poems and essays have
appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Amistad, Achiote Seeds,
and on NPR's "Latino USA." He has been quoted on Latino literature
and culture by The New York Times and the Daily News, and
he directs Acentos, an organization fostering community around Latino/a
literature. His poem “Aubade at 12:56pm” is currently featured at Thrush
Poetry Journal and has been nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Here is one
of my favorite moments in that morning love song:
“The sun refuses
the order to shine, to bathe
your closed eyes in winterglow, the
deep
red purpose of your bedroom: I
will
compose an ode to the Triboro
Bridge,
the dervish upon which the city
spins, wishing
I was Miles, playing what is not
there.”
*
Deborah
Parédez @ Voltage Poetry
Deborah Parédez is a featured
poet of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007) and a CantoMundo
co-founder. She is also the author of This Side of Skin (2002) and
the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of
Memory (2009). Her poem “The Fire” is currently featured in Voltage Poetry
with a critical analysis on the masterful “turns” in this poem. “Turn” here
being the place in the poem where the reader is met with “surprise and
heightened engagement.” The first turn (but not the principal turn in this
poem) being the point in which the speaker plunges the reader in the
description of a physical fire (a suicide by fire) and a “you” who extinguishes
that fire; that is into the “night Tony decided to end it all:”
“bathing his head and limbs in gasoline
and igniting himself into effigy”
Only to be met again by the
“you” whom “[taking] all the necessary precautions” saves Tony’s life.
But this burning figure, only serves
as a vehicle by which to deliver the poems “knock-out” turn in which the
speaker of the poem compares herself to Tony and to the “fire” which can
envelop a person “ablaze and reckless:”
"so that years
later when I, a bright girl, ablaze
and reckless, rushed to embrace you,
you did only what you knew best to
do:
you stayed calm, moved quickly,
took all the necessary precautions,
snuffed out every ember,
saved yourself.”
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