Odalisque in Pieces (Camino del Sol) Tapa blanda - 2009

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In her debut poetry collection, Carmen Gimnez Smith illuminates Latina identity in the prismatic light of postcolonial history, feminism, myth, and the fragmentation of modernity. From these disparate elements she fashions a female persona--"clairvoyant with great shoes"--who is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable. Through her poems we traverse the landscape of a woman's life (girl, mother, lover), navigating a terrain tinted with mythology and relic yet still fresh and uncharted. The poems revolve around issues of identity--and the ways in which identity is both inherited and constructed/reconstructed. Or, as one poem puts it, "The planet floating backwards / whirling some of us older than the stars, some of us nascent and bare." Although she employs techniques of avant-garde poetry, Gimnez Smith shades and deepens the New World landscape into a territory of rare lyric intensity and energy. Humorous, sly, sexy, sophisticated, these poems are animated by passion and hard-won knowledge. In these poems we encounter such strange beauties as a girl assembling and disassembling, a moth trapped in a glass of water, new-age fairy godmothers, and a lark who sings for the milkman. Yet we are also made aware of how these beauties reflect the speaker's troubles--her effort to employ, in the words of one of her most memorable poems, "Only the invisible post where she writes the encounters / with air's lusters. Only the imagined hour / with which she's made a fragile craft." Vivid and charged with an inner light, these are poems that linger and expand in the mind and memory.

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