Description:
The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.
Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Review Quotes: "Girmay has Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African-American roots; the section titled 'a book of erased cities' brings a poignant, multifaceted sense of loss..." -- Publishers Weekly
"There is a saying in Spanish, 'Cada cabeza es un mundo, ' which translates 'every mind is a universe unto itself.' And Girmay's world, universe, opens new ways of seeing the simplest things and giving them voice. Everything contains some clue of another self, body or kindred spirit. Like an archaeologist, she digs deeply finding herself in every living thing, even in the inanimate. Her magic is poetry at its best."--National Book Critics Circle "A cunning consideration of mortality, humanity, and the responsibility of the voice that bears witnesses..." -Los Angeles Review "Vibrant, so much of everything I want to see everywhere: color and joy and snap." -Holly Wendt, blogger Aracelis Girmay anouced as winner of the 2015 Whiting Award: "[Girmay's] project seems to be our deep and ongoing subjectivity, our vulnerability to history, to one another, to desire, and to the belief in something large and lasting that we might belong to. There's empathy, play, and fearlessness here, and both formal and emotional range. The beauty of these poems is always married to a deep, implacable pang. Their consolation is always rooted in the unifying force of remembered loss." --Whiting Award Judges