Description
Poetry. ADELANTE examines the relationships between place and loss, juxtaposing the death of a father with the suffering and resilience of the natural world. These poems use this juxtaposition to explore how images conceal and repurpose each other: a cigar is snuffed inside a conch, butterflies dangle from bullets lodged in tree trunks, and fingertips transform into the coconut they carry. Central to this exploration, the poems in ADELANTE investigate the imagination, demonstrating how such recursive salvaging influences our interactions with the world around us. For example, "The Visible World" begins by considering how passengers on a turbulent airplane find comfort in different things—charm bracelets, a butterfly wing, prayer—which leads to the speaker re-imagining her father's death. These poems further explore place, loss, and imagination by investigating the conflicts between commercial pursuits and the natural world—what happens when the real alligator wanders onto the animatronic beach.
Author Bio
Jessica Guzman's work appears in Shenandoah, jubilat, The Greensboro Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and elsewhere. Her honors include American Literary Review's 2017 Poetry Award and Harpur Palate's 2017 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry, as well as scholarships from the Tin House Winter Workshop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She received her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College.
Author City: LANCASTER, PA USA