BACKYARD MIGRATION ROUTE by Emily Pérez

Backyard Migration Route constructs an American consciousness through a series of delicately tuned lyrics. Hybridity and border crossing are not so much examined as created by these interlocking poems, which refuse to lock into a single culture, a single ethnicity, a fixed identity or a mapped landscape. The brilliance and complexity of this collection of "inbetweeness" lies in its deft ownership of a landscape’s history, a father’s anxiety, a culture’s racism, an unaccented name, just for starters.

—Claudia Rankine, author of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

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Informed by sound, formed in the mind, Backyard Migration Route traces the landscape of the American West. Autobiography, geography, literary criticism and even mathematics weave together. School yourself with these far-ranging poems about growing up between languages and cultures.

—Kazim Ali, author of The Far Mosque and Bright Felon

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"The burn must be my voice, the words / I cannot say." And so Emily Perez "writ[es] it all down" in what feels like a compact family epic. The vivid language, tightly woven, and the inventive use of rhyme make for a marriage of subject and form where ambivalence toward one’s "heritage" seems to be an undercurrent of tension—one where the poet "entwine[s] two parts of [a] nation." At its core, then, Backyard Migration Route is a story of mestizaje. That is, a quintessential American poem.



—Francisco Aragón, author of Puerta del Sol, editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry

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PRE-ORDER at FINISHING LINE PRESS

Supporting the necessary work: Fred Arroyo

The Gift of Light

by Fred Arroyo

Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist is really gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives.

            —Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

"Untitled" (2010) by Malaquias Montoya

When I learned about the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative I immediately felt that I could find a way to collaborate. To be sure, purchasing “Untitled (2010)” wouldn’t be easy; my wife and I had financial concerns because of housing and work, and yet we wanted to offer our support. As we considered where our monies must go and where they did not have to go, it wasn’t that difficult to conclude, in the end, that we could indeed commit the $440 for the print. In short, there were no compelling or valid reason to say no. What is more, it was a matter of memory, imagination, and life to have the print in our lives. And we knew that one day we would gift it to our son, Charles Francis Arroyo.

When Malaquias Montoya’s “Untitled (2010)” arrived, I imagined it framed by a color akin to blood, dirt—the earth. I felt it should exist close to life and death, framed and held up by these colors—the rhythm and color of blood and dirt that is worked, travelled, and lived on with joy and sorrow, dream and reality. And no matter how much “escape” is desired or achieved (the poetry lines in the print are from Andrés Montoya’s “the escape”), one is weighted by memory rooted deep in the earth.

I love that we found this wood frame of “distressed” and “weathered” maroon/cimmarrón. I love that the print now seems to float or hover, stilled and in motion like a hummingbird, and that the frayed edges of the print return me to the notion of hands working with paper. We are honored to own Malaquias Montoya’s work, our first acquisition of fine art.

Work, blood, earth, paper—I’m sure I’m not the only one who returns to these living forces, especially, if like me, you work with paper and books, in a place that returns you to a past that’s palpably present like the damp chill of yesterday’s rain.

I’m sure, as well, that I’m not the only one—as a first-generation college graduate—who is beginning to come to terms with “Latino” or Latino literature. Perhaps for some of us there wasn’t a strong sense of Latinidad inside or outside academic halls (and this was especially so in the Midwest). Part of the problem, of course, is that education makes one conscious of terms like Latino or Latinidad, and yet memory and imagination return one back to the living realities outside academic or marketplace distinctions.

To begin approaching Latin@ communities, particularly for me, has meant a kind of lonely work in learning one tradition while simultaneously learning other traditions outside the academy. I wish this wasn’t so. Even with important progress made for Latin@ writers, there are still forms of inequality alongside the recognition of why Latin@s are, without question, essential to what America has been and is becoming, and how Latin@ writers—a diverse, energetic, and fluid community of artists—offer imaginative possibilities beyond a given term, expectation, or tradition. To contemplate Latin@ creativity in the literary arts is to encounter a new democracy that transcends and transforms US borders.

Letras Latinas, in my view, helps us recognize the power of this creativity through its efforts. This is certainly evident in the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. It seems to me that it would be useless to try and put a quantitative value on what Letras Latinas offers to our community of writers, artists, and scholars. The value is the possibility of one reader, one audience member, one moment of illuminated recognition encountered in a poem on the page or at a reading. That an Emma Trelles (Tropicalia) or a Paul Martínez Pompa (My Kill Adore Him) or a Gabriel Gomez (The Outer Bands) or a Sheryl Luna (Pity the Drowned Horses) have received the prize, have a book to share, and opportunities to read their poetry and talk with audiences is valuable in and of itself.

This is, in great part, why I support this initiative.

This coming fall Malaquias Montoya’s “Untitled (2010)” will hang prominently in my new office. For the next two years I am fortunate enough to hold a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chicano/a literature and creative writing, with an emphasis in fiction, at Whittier College in southern California. As a writer, teacher, and citizen this is a wonderful opportunity filled with possibility and responsibility. A little over 30% of the students who attend Whittier are of Hispanic origin, and becoming a member of a community where one of out three people you interact with is Latin@ is something I haven’t experienced since childhood. To help represent and share the rich complexity of Chicano@ and Latina@ literature is a daunting challenge I welcome; there’s a fire, which is greater than me, I hope to share and see alive inside and outside the classroom. I hope that when students see Malaquias Montoya’s print they will wonder about the woman and the man, the lines of poetry, and in the signage and the colors they might see their lives in California. They’ll ask questions. They’ll remember. Imagine. Begin to envision new things. Hopefully we’ll talk about what exists within and outside the print’s frame, and certainly allow our imaginations to escape to the places and communities we aspire to dream and make a reality. So the languages and literatures we study and create not only arise from the land but are also offered back and written into the land.

This is what I find so important about this initiative: one can choose to support it not only because it recognizes and supports the work of others, but also because it is a part of the work many of us aspire to do.

 Fred and Charlie Arroyo

with "Untitled" (2010) 

Malaquias Montoya

There is a photo of my son Charlie and I holding “Untitled (2010).” One of the best things Charlie ever said of me (it has become part of a story I will always remember) was that his “Papa works with books.” It changed so much about what “work” and life could mean. At the same time, I understand that Charlie will remember and create his own story through these words, and this will be his unique story over time. Work in my life was always something important; it ruled our lives, it had to be done, but it wasn’t something we shared with any excitement, let alone really talked about. Somewhere along the way I must’ve started to dream of an escape. In many ways Charlie has already been gifted this print, since he’s living the memory and story of what it can become for his life.

Ultimately, I support the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative because I’m part of a community that continues to create and become a part of the story, its story, a story that enriches and sustains itself not just through memory, blood, and dirt. There is also fire, sacrifice, and renewal, each of us offering to the other “this small and mysterious exchange of gifts,” what Pablo Neruda once saw as “remain[ing] inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.” We are here, perhaps, in literary endeavors and life because we can gift each other this light.

If you are reading this, particularly if you are a fellow Chican@/Latin@ writer, I hope you will consider (or re-consider) joining me in my support of this initiative.

Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative

Supporting the necessary work: Valerie Martinez

Supporting the necessary work: Wally Babington

Supporting the necessary work: Letras Latinas

Review Roundup—May 23, 2011

Reed Johnson reviews The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry

This hefty volume shows the ethno-linguistic breadth of what we lump under the monolithic term "Latin American" poetry. Like Walt Whitman's poetic Self, the bards of Latin America "contain multitudes." This volume includes works originally written not only in Spanish and Portuguese, but also in French, slangy Caribbean patois (for example, Nicolás Guillén's wonderful "Brief Ode to a Black Cuban Boxer") and indigenous tongues, such as the Nahuatl of Mexican poet Natalio Hernández Xocoyotzin and the Mapuche of the Chilean Elicura Chihuailaf. 

Full review can be found at The Los Angeles Times

Rigoberto González reviews Martín Espada's The Trouble Ball

Espada has the admirable ability to compress extraordinary gravity into a single stanza through which he can display his political leanings with undisguised sentiment ("Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems / from the prison library, and I know why / his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.") or gesture subtly to a startling scene that speaks for itself.

Full review can be found at The El Paso Times 

Sueyeun Juliette Lee reviews Urayoán Noel's Hi-Density Politics

Noel’s various explorations in word play and poetic structures become means for sussing out the dynamic, collective identities that arise in response. He writes in ottava rima, tercets, palindromes, scripts, lists, journal entries, notes, games, flarf, and various modes of translation. This virtuoso performance suggests that both the object of Noel’s poetry and the subject positions from which he writes are in flux. It seems, then, that the city embodies both our ailments (fragmentation, information overload, velocity) and a cure: for Noel, the answer is to continue roving and transforming—in an effort to outpace globalization’s own circuitry, perhaps.

Full review can be found at the Constant Critic

Warren Woessner reviews Jimmy Santiago Baca's The Esai Poems

Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write in a review: Jimmy Santiago Baca writes adorable poems about cute babies. But indeed he does, and often, in The Esai Poems, a collection about his youngest son's first years. In the preface, "25 In/25 Out," Baca reviews his tough-guy ex-con past, "twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence . . . beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings." But, somehow, after he learned to read and write, Baca got out: "To all of the above horrors I say: I have outlasted you. This September 2010 marks the time that I have been more free than imprisoned."

Full review can be found at Rain Taxi Online

Laurie Ann Guerrero reviews J. Michael Martínez's Heredities

In his work, Martinez displays such humility, honesty, and awareness of the blank page-the ability to document-as privilege, cultivating an American existence, simultaneously building up and stripping down the flood of narratives from which he was born: "The Chicano shapes identity like a an icicle fingering down from / the roof's edge" (from "Aporia").

Xicano son of the American Southwest, with ancestral ties spanning Mexico, New Mexico, Texas, this Colorado native transforms each page into a map, into a tool, into art, embodying the thorny and complex examination of the modern Chicano/a identity. Martinez leads the reader through historical, cultural, and familial investigation via the body of his foremothers, to the Spanish colonization of the Aztecs and the birth of the Mexican people, and back again as he ultimately is faced with his own fear of acting on his love for a woman of another race.

Full review can be found at Boxcar Poetry Review

LETRAS LATINAS is pleased to announce...

Jacob Saenz is the fourth recipient of the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship. He will receive $1000 and be in residence for one month this summer at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. This annual distinction is part of an ongoing partnership between Letras Latinas and the Anderson Center. The aim of this initiative is to identify and support a Latino or Latina writer who is working on a first book, and for whom a one month residency would suppose a crucial boost in this effort.

The previous recipients of this fellowship have been:

Michelle Otero in 2008

John Chávez in 2009

Diana Marie Delgado in 2010

There is no application process.

Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago but raised in Cicero, Illinois.  He went to Columbia College Chicago, receving a BA in Creative Writing (Poetry).  While at Columbia, he served as an editor for Columbia Poetry Review.  In addition, he was chosen as Columbia's representative for the annual Citywide Undergraduate Reading Festival in 2006.

His poetry has appeared in the pages of Poetry, Buffalo Carp, Apparatus Magazine, OCHO, Inkstains, Columbia Poetry Review and other journals.  In addition, he has participated in a couple of poetry theater projects, most recently a staged reading of Raymond Roussel's The Dust of Suns.

He currently serves as an associate editor for RHINO and works full-time at a library.

“I feel this opportunity couldn't have come at a better time in my writing career.  While I do have a draft of a chapbook manuscript, I haven't had the time or focus to build that into a full-length collection.  I believe this residency will allow me make great leaps both in my writing as a whole and in my manuscript specifically.  I am very grateful for this opportunity.”

—Jacob Saenz

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Letras Latinas relies on the philanthropic generosity of both institutions and, to a large degree, individuals. The Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship exists, primarily, thanks to the generosity of the Anderson Center, founded and headed by Robert Hedin, poet, translator, and visionary.

SPLIT THIS ROCK POETRY FESTIVAL needs your proposals

We are the ones we have been waiting for. -June Jordan

Split This Rock invites proposals for panel and roundtable discussions, workshops, and themed group readings for our third national poetry festival, scheduled for March 22-25, 2012, in Washington, DC.

As people's movements erupt here at home and throughout the world in response to political repression and environmental degradation, the festival will consider the relationship of poets and poetry to power and to the challenges to power. We are especially interested in proposals that address these questions.

In this vein, Split This Rock welcomes proposals that celebrate the legacy of poet-activist June Jordan, as 2012 marks the tenth anniversary of her death. Such proposals might explore, as Jordan did in her poetry, prose, and activism: the intersection of the personal and political; the overlapping experiences of race, gender, and sexuality in our society; poetic language, including the use of Black English in creative writing and education; and internationalism and the responsibility of the American poet to the struggles of the world's oppressed peoples.

We salute Jordan's pioneering community program at the University of California-Berkeley, Poetry for the People, and invite explorations of its continuing impact. As always, we are interested in hearing about innovative, collaborative, community-oriented poetry programs. Read more about June Jordan at (

http://www.junejordan.com/

DEADLINE: June 30, 2011

**Visit

http://www.splitthisrock.org/festival2012/callforproposals2012.html

for details on developing and submitting your proposal, guidelines, and the application form.**

Please sign up for our email list by going to

http://www.splitthisrock.org/

or "like" Split This Rock on Facebook to stay up-to-date on festival announcements, ongoing programs, and opportunities to help out.

We look forward to reading your proposals

Venezuelan Invisibility

Guest blogger Guillermo Parra weighs in on The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry:

An omission and an incomplete biographical note in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, reflect the invisibility of Venezuelan letters in the world. As a translator who focuses on Venezuelan literature, I can’t help noting these details that evoke the marginal position of Venezuela in the global literary landscape.

A major omission in this anthology is the poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre, whose work marks a turning point in Venezuelan literature. What we now understand as modern and postmodern literary tendencies, Ramos Sucre inaugurated in the 1920s for Venezuelan literature. Ramos Sucre was born in the coastal city of Cumaná in 1890 and died in 1930 in Geneva, Switzerland. During his lifetime he published three books: La torre de Timón (1925), Las formas del fuego (1929) and El cielo de esmalte (1929). Ramos Sucre wrote texts that can be classified as poems, but they also employ elements of fiction, essays and translation. He was inspired by his vast reading of the classics, as well as by poets closer to his era such as Goethe, Leopardi, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. During his lifetime, Ramos Sucre was read by a small but fervent group of friends, poets and critics. But his writing was too experimental and challenging to be widely appreciated in his own time. It wasn’t until the fifties and sixties, when young avant-garde poets such as Juan Sánchez Peláez (who is included in this anthology), Juan Calzadilla and Rafael Cadenas championed his work, that his status as a foundational figure of contemporary Venezuelan literature was recognized. By not including Ramos Sucre in their anthology, Vicuña and Livon-Grosman offer an incomplete snapshot of Venezuelan poetry. 

While it is important to see Juan Sánchez Peláez (Altagracia de Orituco, 1922-Caracas, 2003) included, the inaccuracies in his biographical note are disappointing. Sánchez Peláez deserves a more thoroughly researched biographical note. Sánchez Peláez did indeed collaborate with the surrealist poets of the Mandrágora group, as the note says, when he attended university in Santiago de Chile in the 1940s (where he befriended the recently-deceased Gonzalo Rojas). However, Sánchez Peláez did not work with the poet Rosamel Del Valle during that time, as the note erroneously states. The two poets did not meet until the early 1960s in New York City. His final book, a collection of all his work entitled Obra poética, published by Editorial Lumen in Spain after his death, is not mentioned. Nor is his essential final collection, Aire sobre el aire (1989), a book that reflects the summation of a lifetime’s work. It’s no coincidence that Octavio Paz chose an early version of the opening poem in Aire sobre el aire to publish in his magazine Vuelta in the 1980s.

The note rightfully calls Sánchez Peláez the “initiator of contemporary Venezuelan poetry.” However, he was explicit in acknowledging the influence of Ramos Sucre on his writing. The exclusion of Ramos Sucre from The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry is painful evidence of the invisibility of Venezuelan literature within a global context. But as Juan Sánchez Peláez wrote in his first book, Elena y los elementos (1951), his poetry, like that of José Antonio Ramos Sucre, draws its power from the margins: “Mi sangre de magia fluye hacia ti, bajo la profecía del alba.” [My blood of magic flows toward you, beneath the prophecy of dawn.]

Poet and translator Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA and lives in Durham, NC. He is the author of Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). Since 2003 he has written the blog Venepoetics, where he translates Venezuelan and Latin American poetry into English.