Ruben Quesada
and Gary Jackson @ Boxcar Poetry Review
Back in June of this year I
had the opportunity to profile
Ruben Quesada and his debut collection Next
Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011), of which D.A. Powell writes:
“Like
Whitman, Quesada is a poet of motion—journeying to the center of the US… toward
“that seam in space” where dream and experience intersect.” And which Gary
Jackson confirms in this conversation between the two poets titled “The
Aesthetic of Origins Stories: Gary Jackson and Ruben Quesada,” when he observes:
“I couldn't
stop reading - in part because I found your book has this very natural
trajectory, not necessarily narrative, but a succession of moments that move
forward, chronologically and towards this inevitable maturation.” Gary Jackson
on the other hand reflects on the superheroes in his Missing You, Metropolis and the way in which these characters often
come to reflect the social and historical context of our times, and the ways in
which recent technological advances have been made in an effort to “communicate
with each other—a goal that poetry has been achieving for centuries.”
*
Rigoberto González and Joy Castro @ Critical Mass
Joy
Castro is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln and the
author of The Truth Book: A Memoir (Arcade,
2005), the novel Hell or High Water (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne,
2012. Her most recent is Island of Bones
(University of Nebraska Press, 2012),
and which is profiled in an interview by Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, Rigoberto
González for Critical Mass. Rigoberto González is slated to read—along with
Xochiquetzal Candelari and Lorena Duarte—on October 10 at Macalester College in
Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Of
Island of Bones the reviewers at
Kirkus Review write poignantly: “Throughout her life, Castro has had to
redefine her identity, both to herself and to others. These powerful
transformations form the backbone of this slim volume of visceral pieces.” If in
our contemporary society notions of identity have become powerful ideas not
only in nation building, but also in the construction of myths, which more
often than not exclude or restrict membership for certain groups (I think, from
recent memory, of the Obama birth certificate controversy or this year’s
Republican National Convention’s mantra of “We built it”) than literature like
that of Island of Bones has the power
not only to reveal the danger behind that logic but also to offer a way beyond
such problematic notions of identity:
“Written literature has an unusually powerful rhetorical
opportunity in this regard, due to its intimacy: one person’s story, one
person’s voice entering the mind of the solitary reader. We want to
connect to the speaker of the poem or the narrator of the story. We want
to care, to see things through his or her eyes. We respect the private
story of the individual, and we give it credence. (As writers and
literary critics, we may problematize personae or issues of reliability, but
most readers typically do not.)
Because of this power, literature has tremendous potential to both
honor and complicate inherited cultural narratives. In the Latino studies
courses I teach, students respond more honestly and vulnerably to literature
than to the political, historical, and sociological material we also
study. What they remember are the poems.”
*
Cynthia Cruz @ The Rumpus
Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin (Alice James Book, 2006) and a second collection, The Glimmering Room forthcoming from
Four Way Books. She is a CantoMundo fellow and the current Hodder Fellow in Poetry at
Princeton University. Cruz, a former reader of the PALABRA PURA
reading series, (Letras Latinas was once co-sponsor and curator of the series) is
currently featured in an interview by Lisa Wells for The Rumpus. Wells
describes Cynthia’s poems as “spare, fierce, dark little packages that managed
to feel both mystical—almost like fairytales—and contemporary.” And in
describing the atmosphere which permeates Ruin—what
Wells refers to as the “filth” in Ruin—the
desire to turn the “terrible into the beautiful,” Cruz explains this as her
aesthetic desire to get at the “center of truth,” much like the way in which
the objects we own brutally reveal what we often do not communicate to the
world:
“I
always tell my students to take notes on their lives: to literally write down,
indiscriminately, everything in their world: the Chekhov on the old wood
nightstand near the bed, the chipped tea cup, the pile of French Vogue
magazines stacked on the floor. These objects reveal far more than we can say
about our selves—and more honestly. This is the stuff of our poems. Not
necessarily lists or list poems, but, rather, incorporating, in some way, the
objects which hold meaning into our work.”
*
Fred Arroyo @ The Story Prize
Fred
Arroyo is the author of Western Avenue
and Other Fictions (University of Arizona Press, 2012), and the novel The
Region of Lost Names (University of Arizona Press, 2008), a finalist for the
2008 Premio Aztlán Literary Prize. Arroyo is slated to read from Western Avenue on October 4th at the campus of the
University of Notre Dame. Arroyo is currently featured at The Story Prize with
an interview titled “Fred Arroyo Finds Stories in the Land.” In recalling the
reasons for becoming a writer, Arroyo recalls working long-shifts in Midwestern
factories and taking long drives and walks through the towns and forests of
northern Michigan, where he was “looking for something.” Arroyo recalls reading
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemmingway and liking “the smells and sounds, the images, and the physical sensations and
details”
of the words but more importantly in Arroyo remember recognizing himself and
the people he labored with in that novel. In one of these walks Arroyo finds
himself in the town where Hemmingway’s family had a home only to realize that
what he had been looking for, the stories that can make a writer and reader
confront their real and imaginary losses, where to be found in the land from
which he was driving away from:
“My greatest inspiration
is probably the land. I'm convinced stories are in the land, they exist within
a place, and part of what I must do is listen closely to them. The lived,
storied earth is more central to me than an idea or an aesthetic aspiration, as
are the people who live and work the land. For some reason certain characters
and peoples continue to turn to me, speak to me, and I try to tell their
stories. In my fiction, I write of peoples rooted in a physical
world—workers living, dreaming, and struggling in their place, even if they are
often forced to migrate or question their place because of larger social
pressures, or say the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These
are peoples I admire greatly, even though I know they are often overlooked, and
when they are recognized they are more than likely seen as not belonging, or
failures. Their stories inspire me to move toward new emotional borders or
regions, where fiction has the power to eliminate borders and entangle us in
the drama of the human heart.”
*
Fred
Arroyo is also slated to read—with Richard Blanco—at The River Front Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri on
September 16 (an event co-sponsored by Letras Latinas and Bernardin Haskell Funds, UMKC Dept. of Latina/Latino
Studies/UMKC Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, The Latino Writers
Collective, Riverfront Reading Series, The Writers Place).
