Dante and Angels and Saints ... Oh, My!

I've posted a couple of poems in the blog so far that refer to Dante's Divine Comedy: "Crosses" and "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside." Well, here's a third Dante-influenced poem. I don't think I had realized consciously until doing the blog what an impact Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (and particularly Gustave Doré's illustrations of The Divine Comedy) had had on me as a child, as an artist/poet-to-be, on my imagination and on my sensibilities.

With your indulgence, I'll set up first by telling you Lolo means "grandfather" and Tita means "aunt," although probably those Filipino words are reasonably clear in the poem's context. Okay, here we go.

Wings I really thought it depicted heaven: a picture of the sky entirely filled with a single gigantic rose shaped by the wings of countless angels in Lolo's book. I was five and didn't know this was Dante's Paradiso. All I know is I saw wings everywhere. One evening, a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. But such visions didn't happen only after I saw the Doré engraving of Dante. Three years before, when I was two, Gerardo, my brother born premature, died after a week in an incubator. Mama swore she and Papa heard wings beating near my crib. I pointed, laughing, "Ahdo, Ahdo," my finger tracing an invisible arc as the sound of flapping slipped out the window. What does my daughter, three months old, really see, when her eyes sweep across the room? Ah ... but then I laugh at myself. I'm a computer programmer. I make pixels fandango onscreen. Surely I never really saw angels. I want to believe my cousin and I simply divined our aunt was dying and were wishing just as hard as we could, "Let her go to heaven." Yet I also recall my college roommate Bill heard rustling outside our window. "A trapped bird," I told him, listened for cooing, some sort of cry for help. We looked. Nothing. The next day, a telegram — at the precise moment we heard wings, my Lolo had died.     —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in the Mississippi Valley Review (1989) in a slightly different version.

Click on the images to see them larger. Gustave Doré William Blake Giovanni Britto (?) Commissioned by Alessandro Vellutello Giovanni di Paolo Illuminated manuscript

It is literally true that the Doré illustration (top) of Beatrice and Dante marveling at the heavenly host forming a "white rose" in the Empyrean was, in my child's mind, really heaven. At the age of five (or whatever my actual age was), it didn't occur to me to wonder how Dante or Doré could have known. Since the image was between covers, in a lordly-looking tome, that was enough proof for little me that heaven really looked like that. This is one of my earliest and most powerful, most charged memories.

Click on the first image at the top above to see the Doré image (dated 1867) in all its glory . . . and I do mean "glory." The other images are different artists' renditions of heaven's "white rose" in the Paradiso. (Cantos 30 and 31 if you want to read Dante's descriptions.)

The second image, below Doré, is by poet and printmaker William Blake (c. 1826): a study or sketch showing the white rose as actually looking like a flower, sepals and all, with each petal reserved for a given person or character; Blake died before he could finish the project, so there is no finished art of this subject.

The third image is attributed to the engraver Giovanni Britto, who worked for Francesco Marcolini, the publisher of Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 commentary on the Divine Comedy; Britto — or whoever created this engraving (click on it to see better detail) — renders the rose with a whole multitude of petals that look like thrones with saints and angels and whomever in each one.

The fourth is an illuminated manuscript by Giovanni di Paolo, a Sienese painter (1400s); his rose is smaller in scope than those of the others, but the figures are strikingly rendered. As a child, I only knew the Doré, and it's illuminating (sorry, bad pun) to see these other takes on the white rose image.

The three vignettes involving wings come right out of Gotera family stories, though I've fiddled with them a bit. The middle one, concerning my brother Gerardo, is narrated here just as people in the family tell it. Although I was small enough to sleep in a crib, I evidently knew about Gerardo and pronounced his name as "Ahdo." Narratives of supernatural visits and so on are very common in Philippine contexts; all families have stories like these, passed on from one generation to the next.

In keeping with this kind of family tradition, and the continuation of such traditions, I have tried to keep the language in the poem simple and down-to-earth. Getting the poem ready to post in the blog, in fact, I changed a word in the first stanza. The phrase "countless angels" was originally "innumerable angels," but I thought innumerable now was not in keeping with family scenes of young and old recounting these stories.

As I've posted the 30 or so poems that are on the blog at this moment, I hadn't revised any until now. I wanted the older poems to reflect my style of those other moments, but with "Wings" I felt strongly that the poem really needed revision. And that doing this would give me the opportunity to talk in the blog about revision as a concern of craft.

With that end in mind, here are three stanzas from "Crosses": those on the left, in red, come from the poem as it was published in the Mississippi Valley Review twenty years ago, while those on the right, in blue, are from the version posted above, as revised over the last couple of days.

Old Version (1989) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in my grandfather's house. The gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining angel told us, "Someone important will pass here this evening." While we were sweeping, my Aunt Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .] New Version (2009) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .]

As you compare the two versions, see how more jagged the older version looks: long lines followed by conspicuously shorter ones then vice versa. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with such variation. But somehow it just didn't seem as polished to me now.

I think this may come from my practice since maybe 1990 of starting a poem by writing in iambic pentameter while at the same time trying to sense the form that the poem seems to want for itself. The result of this practice evidently is that I began to appreciate lines that are more similar to each other in length. Whereas twenty years ago, apparently, I liked lines to be more leggy, more varied. Perhaps something here of the garden vs. the wilderness?

It may also be that I have gotten better at sensing the possible junctures, the potential breaks, in lines . . . that I am more open to different sorts of line breaks, and thus more able to regularize line length. For example, in the third line above, "the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony," I didn't (or couldn't?) hear the potential break after the word "me" that might set up an intriguing nuance while at the same time keeping line lengths similar.

The more likely possibility, though, is that I was just not as good at lineation in 1989 as I am today. So I tended back then to go for more flash ... in other words, enjambment. For instance, in the second line above, I break like this: "to brush / the ceiling." Hmm. What possible advantage was there in calling attention to the word "brush"? Doesn't that line break distract? Make the reader wonder why the line ended there? Is it over-dramatic? Even sentimental? It's certainly sensationalistic.

In his excellent book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that good fiction creates "a vivid and continuous dream" in the mind of the reader, and that the good fiction writer will do whatever it takes not to interrupt that dream. What I'm suggesting in the previous paragraph is that lineating at "brush" breaks up the reader's dream's continuity. Granted there can be good times and reasons to do that, to unbalance and destabilize the reader — Garnder notwithstanding — but it's not necessary in the progress of the narrative at this point in the poem.

I think I was probably similarly preoccupied with enjambment in other line breaks in the earlier version — "the gecko / on the wall" (lines 5-6) or "'Sweep / the steps'" (7-8) or "'will pass / here'" (9-10) — perhaps unnecessarily preoccupied with enjambment, to the disservice of the poem overall. And of the reader. Who doesn't need to have to wonder why "gecko" is out at the end of that long line, gone out on a limb, so to speak.

In the more recent version at the right, I smoothed out the earlier over-the-top enjambments. I set up new, more subtle enjambments that are to my older ear more serviceable. More appropriately dramatic . . . that is, less so. The break at line three of "to me / and my cousin Tony" sets up the "me" as seeing himself in a more elevated position, metaphorically, vis-à-vis the angel; that makes a lot more sense to me narratively (especially with regard to characterization) than the previous emphasis on the action of wings brushing a ceiling. Or, at the end of line eight, the stanza enjambment that highlights "Someone" as opposed to the earlier privileging of "pass[ing]." In other words, in both cases, more focus on character than action.

I've also slightly changed some wording; I think these edits are similarly character-related. For example, I've replaced "grandfather" with "Lolo" and "Aunt" with "Tita"; such usage is more appropriate to these child characters, more personal, as well as more probable in the imagined scene of family storytelling, the imagined language that would be used as these stories are told to nieces and nephews, to grandchildren.

I replaced "While we were sweeping" (line 10) with "As we busied ourselves with brooms" not only to avoid repeating the word "sweep" but also to make a clearer picture (and squeeze in another alliteration, this time on /b/). This alteration also sets up a slant rhyme between "brooms" and "from"; while the poem is essentially unrhymed, there are occasional rhymes created by the new lineation: "feathers" and "shoulders" (lines 1-2) or the distant rhyme of "once" with "Someone" (lines 6 and 8).

There are other small changes, but I think I'll leave off there. Wings are everywhere, people. Angels surround us — if not heavenly, then earthly ones. So many small (and large) kindnesses from all our sisters and brothers.

Note: the Doré illustration above comes from Wikimedia Commons. The Blake image comes from the University of Texas's Danteworlds website. The third image, commissioned by Vellutello, comes from the University of Virginia's The World of Dante website. The di Paolo image comes from a different page on that same website. These last two sources in particular provide a wealth of information and visual imagery connected to Dante and The Divine Comedy.

For Jim and Jeremy

This is the second time a poetry reading by my buddy Jeremy Schraffenberger has elicited a post on the blog. Jeremy gave a Final Thursday Series reading last night at the Hearst Center for the Arts. Just like last time, Jeremy performed other people's poems along with his own — A. R. Ammons, Anne Sexton, and James Hearst — always such a genuinely nice gesture that broadens the idea of what a poetry reading is and can be. (Yup, echoes of Dana Gioia Gioia Gioia).

In any case, the inspiration for this post is that in the Q & A session after his reading, Jeremy mentioned that two of his preferred forms were the acrostic and the sonnet. It just so happens I once wrote a poem combining those two forms: an elegy for another buddy, Jim Hiduke aka Dr. Grammar.

Elegy

— an acrostic sonnet for Jim HiDuke

Frost once called his poems "little bits of
Order"— smoke rings wafting in a darkened
Room, the pen glinting in lamplight, sweet love.

Jim would sketch, scratching a woman's face on
A grocery slip, a face like rain in sky.
Morning drizzle, clean swing, white ball arcing,
Edges the green, a yard from the hole, just shy,
So close, always so close. The fish of legend

Hooked, almost in the boat, then the line . . . snapped.
In the darkened room, that trout would resurrect,
Dull shine snagged now on a line of words — grammar,
Unity, syntax — Jim's days always carved, shaped,
Kindled, like Jack London's last match, last cigarette,
Earning love, life through tight devotion to order.

—	Vince Gotera, from the Dr. Grammar website. First appeared as a memorial to Jim in the North American Review (2004).

Jim Hiduke was my colleague at the University of Northern Iowa. He died of a heart attack at his home on 17 November 2003. Although I have heard that he ran his classes like boot camp, Jim was always kind to me when I was a junior faculty member at UNI. He would often stop in at my office and we would exchange Hoosier stories — Indiana, that is. We would talk of fishing and golf, and he was always welcoming to me on those topics although I am neither an angler nor a golfer. Jim achieved international fame as Dr. Grammar, offering a website with "Rx for your writing ills." He would often say about grammar, fishing, and golf: "I live for this stuff!" Thanks for being a good friend, Jim.

Below: Jim in persona as Dr. Grammar

In posts on this blog, I usually talk about craft and technique. Today, however, let's keep the focus on Jim and Jeremy. Suffice it to say that since the poem is an acrostic, you should also read down the page: look at the first letter of each line. In terms of "sonnet-ness," it's a hybrid. 'Nuff said.

Jeremy, thanks for a magical reading: a marvelous evening of excellent poems and also excellent patter with just the right touches of humor. You really know how to work a room. I wish you the best of luck in your career as a poet and also as a professor at UNI. I hope that I — now a senior faculty member, yikes! — have been as good a friend to you as Jim was to me when I was a newbie.

A Pause for the Cause (3.0) ... Anti- Art

I just found out that my photograph "Ergodyne" has appeared as cover art in the poetry magazine Anti-.

Many thanks to the staff of Anti-, especially editor Steven D. Schroeder, for selecting "Ergodyne" to appear as cover art. This is my first time contributing cover art to a magazine. Very exciting. Congrats also to the featured poet, John Gallaher.

To get to "my" Anti- cover (and, of course, John Gallaher's poems): <http://www.anti-poetry.com/feature21>.

Dragonfly (pages 8-9)

The next Dragonfly poem shares a theme with the poem I posted on 15 February, specifically the Good Friday crucifixion thing. When I wrote that poem for Arturo Islas in Texas, where I was visiting, I had read in the San Antonio newspaper that a re-enaction of Christ's crucifixion was to take place on that day, Good Friday — an event that also occurs in various locations in the Philippines, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church, which disapproves of these voluntary crucifixions.

Crosses In the ambulance, streets unrolled through rear windows pulsing to the siren. Plastic tubes sprouting from both arms, I drifted with that thurifer, memory, recalled Stations of the Cross one Friday when I was six, and Mama whispering in Our Lady of Antipolo church in Manila, "See that old woman over there — near St. Jude? That's Aleng Tosang. Last year, she walked on her knees from Jerusalem to Calvary." I mixed up calvary with cavalry then: bearded men with muskets ride horses round wooden crosses on a hill. I had already discovered in Tatay's sala a large and dusty book with drawings of men in some dark wood, their chests slit, loose entrails like gutted fish. Every year, when the saints would hide their faces under purple cloth, penitentes in black hoods walked the streets on parade, scourging themselves with whips of knotted Manila hemp. And Sister Mary Helena told us in the fourth grade about an American chaplain who said Mass daily in a North Korean POW camp. For wine a raisin soaked in water, then squeezed into a thimble. Page 8

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She called our bodies her temples of the Holy Ghost. We saw snapshots of Christians in China, nailed on huge wooden ideographs, and I remember I prayed, "Me too, God. Me too." The ambulance is slowing now, then nurses wheel me, flat on my back. White hosts in fluorescent ciboriums glow in benediction. But I'm remembering last week, I entered some church on a whim. In the dark there I'm kneeling to say thanks, and I can think only of that cloud of incense which isn't floating now in the nave. Of Pasig where Papa was raised, where friends still nail penitentes to crosses and raise them up for fifteen minutes. Of Aleng Tosang trudging on her knees to Paradise. Page 9

I hardly know what to say about this poem. I wrote it while I was in the Master of Fine Arts poetry program at Indiana University, probably for a poetry workshop, though it's possible that I wrote it specifically for my MFA thesis. Over two decades ago, then. I was having a lot of trouble with asthma at that time, and the ambulance scene that starts off this poem took place several times. I don't recall specifically if memories wafted through my brain like drifts of incense, though they certainly could have. Those ambulance and hospital trips were often kind of psychedelic, you know?

The word thurifer is a technical term that goes very well with memory trips, at least with my memory. In the Catholic tradition, the thurifer is the altar server — "altar boy" back in my day — or at high mass or other elite ceremonies a priest who tends the thurible — the metal incense burner, or censer, suspended from chains and held in the hand. Whenever, as an altar boy, I was assigned to be a thurifer, I often flashed back to an incident when I was probably four or five and fainted at a church service from smelling burning incense; that half-remembered incident was certainly psychedelic, with fanciful, Alice-in-Wonderland visions I can no longer conjure today. Being a thurifer was quite a privilege, as I remember, and you had to master the techniques of working the thurible, which could be unwieldy because you held on to the chains and not the censer itself; also you had to be a little careful not to let sparks burn moth-holes in your cassock, the black robe. Or on your surplice, for that matter, the white over-thingy.

In terms of craft and technique, I can't really remember any more why I used the word thurifer in this particular context, except that there is something really trippy about IVs and ambulances and EMTs; you just let go and let your brain fly, because people who know what they're doing take over your body and you can relax, let your guard down. The drugs they give you ain't bad, either . . . you can take off into the ether, sail up into clouds, drift into deep high blue. Oh and of course thurifers and thuribles are so Catholic.

The trigger for this poem is Philippine Catholicism's sometime convergence of religion and violence, particularly a kind of self-sacrificial masochism in the service of faith. Blind faith, some might say. For example, the custom of of penitents who volunteer to be crucified on Good Friday — with real nails! Or the other penitentes, self-flagellants who whip their backs into a bloody froth before these crucifixions. All done to make up for one's sins. You probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Catholic Church in the Philippines distances itself from these activities, saying that Christ's sacrifice is a one-time act that cannot be replicated. It may also not surprise you to hear that province governments practically sponsor these events in order to draw tourists into their areas, advertising the crucifixions and flagellations as brutal yet strangely attractive spectacles.

Although as a child I was not aware expressly of these sorts of religious tortures, I had already had a personal intro, of sorts. In my grandparents' formal living room in Manila, I had stumbled, early on, upon my Lolo's edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, with the exquisite Gustave Doré engravings. I remember being utterly fascinated and enthralled by these illustrations, and feeling at the same time that they were somehow forbidden because as far as I knew I was the only one who ever looked at them, and I only did so when there was no one around. I was particularly intrigued by images of the Inferno and both shuddered and thrilled at the horrific punishments — eternal ones! for pity's sake — especially the one described (and shown) above: where a demon with a humongous sword would slice open the damned, who would then further rip themselves open, tender innards pulled out and exposed to the noxious air of Hell. That one really stuck with me. The lacy, graceful, June Taylor Dancers, Busby Berkeley mandalas of angels in the sky of Paradiso were no match whatsoever, I tell ya.

I had heard, however, of people walking on their knees in penitence. Or, more accurately, had seen them. Not uncommon in Philippine churches to see women walking on their knees from church door to communion rail. So the idea that someone would knee-walk the cobblestones of the entire Via Dolorosa (Latin for "the way of suffering") — starting at the Lion's Gate, the edge of old Jerusalem, and ending up on Calvary or Golgotha, now inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — that idea would not be strange at all. (Probably more the stuff of legend than actual possibility, although pilgrims have walked and still walk the route barefoot, as Jesus did.)

In any case, through chismis or gossip, a person like Aleng Tosang in my poem could be rumored to have walked the Via Dolorosa on her knees, even if she had simply walked it upright, like the pilgrims in the picture above, carrying a wooden cross as symbol of their imitation of Christ's passion.

Without a doubt, there's an element here of heroism, of hero worship. Aleng Tosang would be considered a hero. And think of Ruben Enaje, pictured above being raised on a cross and featured in this Reuters video; he has been crucified for 22 consecutive Good Fridays. Twenty-two! That's a superhero record, don't you think? Not just in the Philippines, but anywhere — even in the USA.

My fourth-grade teacher in the US, Sister Mary Helena, did tell us the story of the unnamed US Army Chaplain in a POW camp who hoarded raisins (maybe from the Red Cross) to make thimblefuls of altar wine so he could perform his duty to celebrate mass; Sister called him a hero of the first order. Catholic tradition has many heroes: saints, angels, and especially martyrs. Kids in Catholic grade schools — in whatever schools! — they all want to be heroes too. I'm not the only person raised Catholic who, as a kid, wished to be a martyr.

Now perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but I gotta admit I wonder if the Good Friday penitentes in the Philippines are pursuing that same desire to be a hero, pushed to obsessive lengths. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying the penitentes are inauthentic. I'm sure all of them believe fully in what they are doing. No one could do what they do without such amazingly strong belief, don't you think?

The little Catholic school kid inside me yearns for a taste of their power, their heart. The speaker in the poem — well, really me, on several levels — we both wish for the ability to have that certitude of faith, that strength of resolution, that keen courage in one's belief. All I can say is amen to that, sisters and brothers. Amen to that.

DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

This poem also appeared as part of a mini-collection titled “A Poetry Reading: In Homage to Carlos Bulosan” in Bearing Dreams, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives, edited by Linda A. Revilla, Gail M. Nomura, Shawn Wong, and Shirley Lune (1993).

The illustrations above are (1) Frederic Remington's painting "The Cavalry Charge" (1907), from the Metropolitan Museum of New York; (2) Gustave Doré's illustration of Canto 28 of Dante's Inferno, picturing schismatics, notably Mohammed in the center (Wikimedia); (3) a BBC news photograph of self-flagellants on Good Friday in the Philippines, 2007; (4) a BBC news photograph of Ruben Enaje being cruficied for his 21st time in as many years, Good Friday, 2007, in the Philippines; (5) a BBC news photograph of voluntary crucifixion in the Philippines on Good Friday, 2000; (6) contemporary Christian pilgrims carrying a cross on the Via Dolorosa — image courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org; and (7) a thurifer carrying a thurible (Wikimedia).

The video embedded above can be viewed in the context of the original Reuters video story, "Christ's Crucifixion Re-enacted" (March 21, 2008).

Thanks, Best American Poetry!

I would very much like to thank Emma Trelles for mentioning Fighting Kite, my 2007 poetry collection, in The Best American Poetry blog in her post "Big Love, Little Books" (13 February 2009). I truly appreciate the good word, Emma — such a nice plug.

For those who are not familiar with Fighting Kite, here is the title poem, an elegy for my father, Martin Avila Gotera.

Fighting Kite — 1930 — Just outside Manila, it was my father's ninth birthday, but all he could think about was his duel with fighting kite that afternoon. For weeks, he'd been grinding glass between rocks: green for luck. The kite string soaked in glue then dipped in powdered glass. In the sun, the string would gleam — filament of emerald. His kite emblazoned with a vermilion hawk, talons of shiny hooks and razors hammered from tin-can lids. At 3 P.M. sharp, his hawk dancing a red tinikling in the sun, my father stood by the Pasig River, his twelve-year-old opponent on the other bank, the wind blowing downstream. In the sky, the other kite was a silver mantis with bat wings. The hawk and mantis swiveled and faked like mongoose and cobra. My father gauged the wind like a cat's paw on his cheek, waiting for the breeze to hold its breath, then the whiplash crack of his wrist. Hawk whirled around mantis, razors flashing — kite strings twining, sliced. The bat wings ripped away in tatters. He'd won, my father had won. — 1989 — Swimming in that white hospital bed — IVs like kite strings in reverse piercing his arms — Papa must have longed to soar, to leave behind his sick and scarred heart, his breath trapped in emphysemic lungs . . . O to fly like some red-feathered bird, to dance free in lucid air above the sparkling Pasig. How far, then, you could see: the jungle green rock of Corregidor leaping from Manila Bay, the Pacific stretched flat out, an aquamarine mirror, endless and new. The razors of Papa's soul slashed at his lines — invisible strings tethered deep in the ground — then Papa launched into gold and purple sky like the sun's first flash breaking from the east, his fingers uncurling slowly from a clenched fist.

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in Hawai'i Pacific Review (1992); reprinted in the textbook Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Shawn Wong (1996).

As far back as I can recall, my father told me tales about flying fighting kites, a sport he engaged in throughout his youth. Kite fighting is done in many countries across the world; the sport is a major motif in Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner, which was made into a feature film in 2007. But for me, the fighting kite was (and still is) a thing of romance, a source of adventure and fable in bedtime stories I heard from my father.

I wrote several versions of the first half of this poem over a number of years, versions that simply didn't do justice to my dreams and fantasies about kite fighting. But it was not until Papa's death in 1989 that the poem came together, as I realized that the fighting kite was, for me, a symbol of his difficult and fascinating life. The book's description on the back cover reads, in part, "Fighting Kite narrates, in verse, the life of Martin Avila Gotera — son, trickster, soldier, schizophrenic, visionary, lawyer, workingman, father &mdash a life that glimmers like a node, a shimmery knot, a glowing nexus . . ." And that's what the fighting kite is: a "nexus," a connection, a symbolic gathering of the threads, strands, strings of his life. In fact, I learned recently that the proper term is "fighter kite," but I am sticking with "fighting kite" because I think of my father as continually acting, constantly striving to make a better life for himself and his family, ultimately his people, despite illnesses and obstacles.

As you know if you are a frequent reader of the blog, it's my practice to say a bit about craft and technique in each poem. But I think I'll just let this one speak for itself. Martin Avila Gotera was quite a fascinating person — a man of passions and problems; the back-cover description ends by calling him "brilliant and troubled, tormented and wise." I hope my poems, and the book, do justice to his memory.

Once again, many thanks to Emma Trelles and to The Best American Poetry blog. Keep the faith, people!