Heresies
Poems
University of New Mexico Press
Heresies is an invocation of Latin American and Caribbean culture, history, and spirituality. Through free verse and poetic forms, the collection is visually charged and sonically rich. The poems incorporate history, legend, and magical realism to create a cross-cultural baroque feeling. Heresies is witty, probing, transgressive, and carnivalesque.
Heresies is a rich, satisfying collection imbued with wit, compassion, and a respectful skepticism for multicultural religious devotion and all its complexities.'—Daniel A. Olivas, El Paso Times
Menes’s poems bring to light patterns of personal and spiritual corruption and the power relations between insiders and outsiders on which economic, social, and religious systems are based.'—Cincinnati Review
Heresies hordes detail, combining fact and fiction, and lets symbols accumulate as they do in a culture. It weaves bodily and religious imagery, arousing readers to examine their own beliefs.…An intense and masterful undertaking that requires careful dissection.'—Prairie Schooner
A scholar, a painter, an El Greco of boundless darkness and light, a Caliban coming back to laugh and sing. A tour de force. This is an incredible accomplishment--luscious, jeweled, intoxicating, fragrant as copál and sharp as obsidian.'--Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate of California
Brutally irreverent, reverently made, at once polyphonic and singular in its scope, Heresies is a work of fearless, sublimely syncretic imagination.
Orlando Ricardo Menes is the author of three other books of poetry, including Fetish: Poems. His work has appeared in the Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, Callaloo, and elsewhere.
