We navigate the sudden shifts of tone as we might try to navigate an unexpected undertow. Neither the quirkly-lovely image of the speaker holding a grasshopper’s femur nor the slightly surreal invitation to imagine falling “blue air” prepare us in any way for the raw, plain-spoken emotional confession of the next few stanzas. The tone shifts twice more, the same pattern, incidentally filling out a landscape, and then:
Forrest Gander on "Against the Encroaching Grays" |
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"It’s About Time We Fail: A Puerto Rican Poetics of Exhaustion"
"Puerto Rican poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado presents a handy manual for exposed exhaustion in her poem 'Hack.' From her book Periodo especial, whose title likens Puerto Rico’s current circumstances to the Cuban Special Period of economic crisis in the 1990s, 'Hack' plays with the temporal contours of mid-emergency life....The English title of the poem evokes the recent trend of 'life hacks,' advice that offers shortcuts to make daily tasks easier. In the poem, slowness is a shortcut, a coping technique, amid the fast-paced transformation of life after Hurricane Maria and the crisis."
viaPUBLIC BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Peter Cole on Translation
"The Hebrew word tikkun means, simply, 'repair,' but it is best known beyond spoken Hebrew as a kabbalistic term that has seeped into the popular imagination. In that context it alludes to course corrections of consciousness that lead to tikkun olam—repair, mending, or even healing of a broken world. Rooted in the tradition of the biblical prophets, and critical to classic rabbinic considerations of social viability and harmony, tikkun has, arguably, become a core Jewish concept that calls for working toward a more compassionate social fabric, in part by identifying and combatting injustice." |
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