Maurice Kilwein Guevara views the poem as a living art form that stretches well beyond the traditional bounds of poetry. Citing the Catalan avant-garde artist Joan Brossa, who printed the word POEMA on a clear lightbulb, Kilwein Guevara rethinks the interconnectedness of form, context, and meaning in a poem. While he is aware of the blood flow through a single poem—and his poems are coursing with life—he is simultaneously aware of the capillary effect that nourishes every poem in this collection. His engrossing experiments with form and his often startling juxtaposition of poetic subjects succeed so well because they are animated by a unifying force: the poet’s hyperawareness of our fragile—and frequently confusing—humanness.
Inside this book you will find a poema asking itself a litany of questions, two lovers taunting fate with each kiss, Gertrude Stein as an infant discovering language in Pittsburgh, Plan Colombia spraying farmers’ fields with herbicides, and a beetle crawling into the ear of a president as he trumpets his imagined glories. Lines in Spanish sneak unannounced into a poem here and there, only to sneak out as quietly as they entered. Dictators rise and fall. Lovers quarrel. Humans, we begin to understand, are always vulnerable: as vulnerable to our lovers as to our rulers; as vulnerable in our bodies as moths, perhaps, or spiders. And in the end you have to wonder “What wakes you/just as you begin to dream of Heidegger / in a clouded field of summer chives?”
Inside this book you will find a poema asking itself a litany of questions, two lovers taunting fate with each kiss, Gertrude Stein as an infant discovering language in Pittsburgh, Plan Colombia spraying farmers’ fields with herbicides, and a beetle crawling into the ear of a president as he trumpets his imagined glories. Lines in Spanish sneak unannounced into a poem here and there, only to sneak out as quietly as they entered. Dictators rise and fall. Lovers quarrel. Humans, we begin to understand, are always vulnerable: as vulnerable to our lovers as to our rulers; as vulnerable in our bodies as moths, perhaps, or spiders. And in the end you have to wonder “What wakes you/just as you begin to dream of Heidegger / in a clouded field of summer chives?”
It is rare to see contemporary writing so passionately crafted and so hyper-aware of the conventions of poetry, which is precisely what gives this poet license to stray from these very conventions. Here is a body of work at once troublingly beautiful and haunting. Lovers of language will surely swoon.' —MultiCultural Review
It is rare to see contemporary writing so passionately crafted and so hyper-aware of the conventions of poetry, which is precisely what gives this poet license to stray from these very conventions. Here is a body of work at once troublingly beautiful and haunting. Lovers of language will surely swoon.' —MultiCultural Review
Maurice Kilwein Guevara's POEMA is a necessary book for our time. His poems ‘howl in the trees’ and they are made of the stuff of daily life: ‘broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack needles.’ It is through these things that the poet's spirit springs forth, angry and tender, grieving and playful. Guevara has achieved great balance in his poems. POEMA is the work of a mature and remarkably gifted poet.’ —Pablo Medina, author of The Cigar Roller
Maurice Kilwein Guevara's POEMA is a necessary book for our time. His poems ‘howl in the trees’ and they are made of the stuff of daily life: ‘broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack needles.’ It is through these things that the poet's spirit springs forth, angry and tender, grieving and playful. Guevara has achieved great balance in his poems. POEMA is the work of a mature and remarkably gifted poet.’ —Pablo Medina, author of The Cigar Roller
“In his original, and superbly wrought, new volume of poems, Maurice Kilwein Guevara is righteous, funny, tender, melancholy, outrageous, musical, philosophical, terrifying, formal, colloquial, a realist, a surrealist, and a visionary—all at once. This poet takes us places we hadn’t visited before.” —Jaime Manrique, author of Our Lives Are the Rivers
“In his original, and superbly wrought, new volume of poems, Maurice Kilwein Guevara is righteous, funny, tender, melancholy, outrageous, musical, philosophical, terrifying, formal, colloquial, a realist, a surrealist, and a visionary—all at once. This poet takes us places we hadn’t visited before.” —Jaime Manrique, author of Our Lives Are the Rivers
Maurice Kilwein Guevara writes with exacting emotional detail, whether the subject is an instance of the personal or an instance of the political, or the merging of the two. The people, images, and attitudes that inhabit the poems in POEMA are unforgettable.’ —Michael Burkard, author of Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966–1990
Maurice Kilwein Guevara writes with exacting emotional detail, whether the subject is an instance of the personal or an instance of the political, or the merging of the two. The people, images, and attitudes that inhabit the poems in POEMA are unforgettable.’ —Michael Burkard, author of Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966–1990
Lyric
Against Metaphor
The other word for thesaurus
Click
Someone Complaining Around Here
One Star
Joan Brossa as the Emerald Moth Discharging Energy
Two Poets This Morning and Me in My Red Boxer Shorts
Mr. Berryman Has Injured His Foot in Putting Out a Fire
In the City of Havana, El Porvenir
Bright Pittsburgh Morning
I’ll never eat another rarebit as long as I live
II
At rest
History
Poema cubano con cara vieja
Filching Freud
What Baby Gertrude Heard
Soup for an Oligarch
At the Podium
Below
The Exegesis
Blue Dress of Chiquinquirá
A found poem with translations
New Year’s Day, 2006
5:25 a.m. on August 7, 1957: Nevada Test Site, 19 Kilotons
Red Brow of Moon
Then, poema asks
III
Little people sitting around roasting little elephants
Pets
Long Time Ago in Chicago John Prine Used to Be My Friend’s Mailman
Hector the Colombian Who Butchered the Hair of Juan Ramón
Las cucarachas pintadas
The Sound of Glass is Unmistakable
Pepenador de palabras
Poema with orange, black-edged wings
Let’s
Rata’s Preamble
Native Mussels
West of Eliza Furnace
Cage
IV
At Sunrise, Oaxaca
Teusaquillo, 1989
Poema andino
La gota fría
Águila y cóndor
Cholula
Sometimes I listen to a song six times
If you could this summer, who would you kiss?
Poema without hands
Whisper Beside Falling Bodies
Acknowledgments
