Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Jeremy Paden returns with a new chapbook of poems imagining the lives of people trapped in darkness, in this case the man-made darkness of political imprisonment in Chile and Argentina. Inspired in substance by stories told by Fernando Reati, and in style by the Argentine poet Juan Gelman, Paden provides an unflinching and harrowing account of survival in the face of the most extreme brutality (carried out by regimes, let us not forget, abetted by the US and other Western powers), of the means by which prisoners sustain not only the body, but the spirit. Accounts of making "sock cheese," of bread pudding flavored by strawberry toothpaste, or the necessity of extracting every virtue from a single lemon, emerge as recipes for resistance. In one poem Paden asks, "can a songbird sing in a vacuum"? This little volume is the answer: Yes, they sing, but they can only be heard if those of us on the outside will echo their songs as loudly and long as we can. And we must.
Author Bio
Jeremy Dae Paden was born in Milan, Italy, and raised in Central America and the Caribbean. He received his PhD in Latin American literature at Emory University, and is Professor of Spanish at Transylvania University and also on the faculty of Spalding University's low-residency MFA, where he teaches literary translation. He is the author of several chapbooks: the poetry collections PRISON RECIPES, Broken Tulips and RUINA MONTIUM, and a book of translations, Delicate Matters. His poems and translations have appeared widely in journals and in the anthology Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets which he also co- edited. He is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and resides in Lexington, Kentucky.
Author City: LEXINGTON, KY USA