Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. TALK SHOWS is accomplished translator Monica de la Torre's first book of original poetry in English. "De la Torre's poetry deconstructs sets of beliefs about what it means to be a multi-dimensional subject and turns markers of gender and race on their so-called ears. Identity and gender politics are folded neatly into smart disses and observations on the specifics of cultural play and gaff, making this a book to be reckoned with"--Lee Ann Brown.

Talk Shows

Literature & Fiction

Monica De La Torre

Poetry

Switchback Books

Poetry. Caroline Noble Whitbeck holds a BA in Classics (Latin) from Harvard College and an MFA from Brown University. OUR CLASSICAL HERITAGE: A HOMING DEVICE is the winner of the 2006 Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books. According to judge Arielle Greenberg, "Our Classical Heritage is a pleasurable and witty work, pinned sharply but delicately to reality through images of cultural detritus and evocations of American childhood. The force of the voice here is redoubtable. The world as described may be a dizzying soup of existence, but Caroline Noble Whitbeck can always locate herself." OUR CLASSICAL HERITAGE: A HOMING DEVICE is Caroline Noble Whitbeck's first book.

Our Classical Heritage: A Homing Device

Whitbeck, Caroline Noble

Poetry. Marisa Crawford's first collection of poetry evokes The Breakfast Club's angst with deliberate control and fresh upheaval. Centering on coming-of-age themes, Crawford is brutally honest yet careful in her representations and confessional moments—she invokes a preteen voice, capturing in detail female subjects, such as one who wears "cotton flowers on her undershirt," and describing "men who leave handprints all over your blankets." There is a maddening and desirous investment in the characters littered throughout: Ivy, Deidre, Virginia, Stephanie, Megan. Each girl is a catalyst for another brilliantly crafted poem; each poem is a catalyst for swizzle-stick nostalgia and a close re-examination of girlhood. The winner of the 2008 Gatewood Prize, Crawford reminds us that although we may make it out of our childhoods alive, we never quite shake our own personal geographies.

The Haunted House

Crawford, Marisa

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Art. Memoir. In this bold and energetic debut, temporal malapropisms become purposeful play through Tamayo's poetics of code switching and homophonics. As Tamayo tackles the frustrations of the transnational immigrant experience, language "mistakes" become "missed aches" and she writes mother and mother-tongue into one as "mouth her." A red thread intrudes throughout this frenetic mixed-genre assemblage, suturing identity to the page by erasing text, embroidering images, and stitching collage together. Cathy Park Hong, 2010 Gatewood Prize judge, promises the "brash, political, and bracingly original" [RED MISSED ACHES] will "startle you awake and demand your attention."

Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes

Tamayo, Jennifer

Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Gatewood Prize selected by Harryette Mullen. "MANIFEST makes me stop reading and recite poems to whoever is sitting next to me, be it a friend, a stranger, or a tinfoil factory. It's not only the beauty of the images and lines, the engrossing narratives, or the polished syntax and music; it's the power of Cynthia Arrieu-King's attention. The chaos of interiority finds logic in both the rhetoric of the image and the mathematics of the sentence, while the chaos of exteriority is translated through mediations and also capricious signifiers. It welcomes me into a world I did not know I knew."—Mathias Svalina"Cosmopolitan, full of wilderness, immensely attentive, and dangerously funny, the poems in Cynthia Arrieu-King's second book MANIFEST are beautifully self-possessed even as they operate far above usual ideas of self. This is a book of secrets. Reading it has changed me. It has opened me up to the secrets in each moment of being alive."—Laura Cronk

Manifest

Arrieu-King, Cynthia

Poetry. "Heim's poems are treasurehouses of carved thought: she is actually thinking, word by word, line by line, and her argument's currents seem to etch patterns in the syntax, like wall carvings made by a delicate and ethical hand. Everything here is transparency, lightness—illuminations sifted through a mind willing to be unsettled by experience's injurious data. Reading these phenomenal and profoundly philosophical poems, I think of still lives by Giorgio Morandi—careful, enigmatic arrangements of the ordinary. Heim's acoustic elegance places her in the front ranks of those who pursue the plainspoken sublime."—Wayne Koestenbaum

A Table that Goes on for Miles

Heim, Stefania

Poetry. African American Studies. "I love these poems by Morgan Parker. They tell everything exactly like it is, and they don't let us off the hook—about how we run this country, about race, about how we spend our time. They treat our private, public, and online lives with all the love and scorn they deserve. They hit you with the authority and moral clarity of Langston Hughes, and have the omnivorous eye of Frank O'Hara. They have a New York School sensibility, but it's a new New York—a more polarized, unequal, and privileged New York. These poems are also just beautiful. You will want to say them to yourselves."—Matthew Rohrer "Honesty, says one of Morgan Parker's speakers, 'is uncomfortable and funny.' And how apt, how acrobatic and unflinching Parker is in bearing this thesis out. Her work roves the surfaces of our American lives—gathering up material from reality TV, from the many products we consume and are shaped by, from the sound of America in our mouths, and the racket of it in our ears. These poems are delightful in their playful ability to rake through our contemporary moment in search of all manner of riches, just as they are devastating in their ability to remind us of what we look like when nobody's watching, and of what the many things we don't—or can't—say add up to. OTHER PEOPLE'S COMFORT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT is hilarious and hard-hitting, and it ripples with energy, insight, and searing music."—Tracy K. Smith "I can and have read Morgan Parker's poems over and over. They make me high and think like this: Her mind and her thoughts can go anywhere in a poem. She pulls us up short, and when she says 'the sky the sky' I feel that expanse... I start taking notes: She is making a map of what human can be... she's raucous and engaged... indeterminate, visceral... collisions... these are full adventures in scale... Morgan Parker is both intellectual and concerned. Where sentences come from (in me) breaks down when I read these poems. There are piles of masterpieces here. 'I'm not like the king of black people,' to point you to one. She writes history and pleasure and kitsch and abstraction, then vanishes like a god in about 13 inches and I mean that is really cool."—Eileen Myles

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night

Parker, Morgan

Poetry. "Now this is it. A book that is a necessity, drawn from a star world, a real world, an unreal world, an alternate world, one that we come to again and again but do not find the words for easily ourselves. It is a world that reminds me of Bernadette Mayer and Tracy K. Smith and Shakespeare. Crystal Curry's poems find the words we have longed to find easily and completely, in the clearest of letters, from one human to another, in the space of real conversation, packing beauty upon beauty upon beauty. It is a world where the interior lies on the one listening, which luckily is us, as she performs what the self is and can and cannot be, over and over again. Read this book."—Dorothea Lasky, 2014 Gatewood Prize judge "These poems hold us and humor us, resisting healing and self-help in favor of those intimacies through which we might realize a gain. Full of wit and surprise, BUT I HAVE REALIZED IT rouses itself page after page, arcs forward and keeps going, finding its own 'upward mobility' and taking the reader with it."—Amaranth Borsuk

But I Have Realized It

Curry, Crystal

Poetry. "In COPPER MOTHER, Alyse Knorr imagines a future in which Voyager makes first contact with alien others, who then travel to Earth and introduce themselves as 'Our Friends.' But rather than trying to experience something outside themselves, the speakers search for the 'me of ourselves' in the 'me of their flesh.' They create a projection of the 'self' that 'twists, / makes new space, / [and] consumes future' within these strangers. Knorr's collection reads as a cautionary tale of ethical engagement with the other, and how such interactions can easily transform into solipsistic explorations."—Joshua Ware "If the Voyager Golden Record was intended to display the diversity of culture and life on Earth, Alyse Knorr's wildly inventive COPPER MOTHER is a retake, our new rendition. Honest in critique of gender, violence, and environmental decay, these poems allow that we see ourselves from afar."—Sally Keith

Copper Mother

Knorr, Alyse

Poetry. "Rarely am I so submerged in the details of a poet's mind and world as I am with Marisa Crawford's work. It's bright and glitter roll-on scented, with a pitch-perfect 90s soundtrack. It's nostalgic, dark, surprising yet warmly familiar. I mourn for the girlhood of this book. In REVERSIBLE, Crawford has created an incredibly moving and vivid archive of growing up—part monologue, part lyric, part ethnography—distinct, striking, tender, and enchanting."—Morgan Parker "Marisa Crawford's poems give me a kind of ecstatic pleasure, as all the sensory and social strangeness of 90s youth come flooding back. I will never understand how she can remember all these details and evoke them with such feeling—she must have an off-the-charts EQ, and also an off-the- charts whatever the 'Q' is that measures the ability to remember every outfit you ever wore. 'E' is also for empathy: in Crawford's poems, everything that happens to her friends happens to her. And then I'm in their glow, and everything that happened to Crawford and her friends happens to me. Her poems also know, better than any I've ever read, that fashion is imagery; ditto for friendships and stickers and backyard pools and the things girls do to their bodies in their bedrooms late at night. It doesn't matter that the box of old cassette tapes that you hope will be in your parents' basement might not be findable: all we want to do is go searching alongside her, following her flashlight beam as it lights up the feelings inside the objects we put away or gave away or forgot we ever had."—Becca Klaver "Dear M,

Reversible

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