Maurice Kilwein Guevara views the poem as a living art form that stretches well beyond the traditional bounds of poetry. Citing the Catalan avant-garde artist Joan Brossa, who printed the word POEMA on a clear lightbulb, Kilwein Guevara rethinks the interconnectedness of form, context, and meaning in a poem. While he is aware of the blood flow through a single poem—and his poems are coursing with life—he is simultaneously aware of the capillary effect that nourishes every poem in this collection. His engrossing experiments with form and his often startling juxtaposition of poetic subjects succeed so well because they are animated by a unifying force: the poet’s hyperawareness of our fragile—and frequently confusing—humanness. Inside this book you will find a poema asking itself a litany of questions, two lovers taunting fate with each kiss, Gertrude Stein as an infant discovering language in Pittsburgh, Plan Colombia spraying farmers’ fields with herbicides, and a beetle crawling into the ear of a president as he trumpets his imagined glories. Lines in Spanish sneak unannounced into a poem here and there, only to sneak out as quietly as they entered. Dictators rise and fall. Lovers quarrel. Humans, we begin to understand, are always vulnerable: as vulnerable to our lovers as to our rulers; as vulnerable in our bodies as moths, perhaps, or spiders. And in the end you have to wonder “What wakes you/just as you begin to dream of Heidegger / in a clouded field of summer chives?”

Poema (Camino del Sol)

Literature & Fiction

Kilwein Guevara, Maurice

Poetry

The University of Arizona Press

The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets.

Poems Of The River Spirit (Pitt Poetry Series)

University of Pittsburgh Press

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "With a magical naturalism that refuses to separate the local from the global, Maurice Kilwein Guevara's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SO-AND-SO: POEMS IN PROSE holds our eye close to the Western wound: where cultures mix only by bleeding into each other. These prose chronicles reconfigure fixed assumptions about self and enter a threshold past which facts are as haunted as nightmares and consensual reality has become a waking dream" - William Olsen.

Autobiography of So-and-So: Poems in Prose (Green Rose)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

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Books by Kilwein Guevara, Maurice

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kilwein Guevara, Maurice. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Poema (Camino del Sol)

Poems Of The River Spirit (Pitt Poetry Series)

Autobiography of So-and-So: Poems in Prose (Green Rose)