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Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive.
The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 26, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780807025987
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780807025987
- File size: 1002 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 1, 2019
Generous and deeply felt, the long prose poems in this moving new collection from presidential inaugural poet Blanco (after Looking for the Gulf Motel) help us understand what it means to cross a border. But, more universally, Blanco shows us how the struggle for identity and the need to lay claim to a place in the world can't be separated, especially today. Blanco's talent is such that his struggle to feel at home in America, the country his family chose for him, is manifested on each page--sometimes writ large, as in "LET'S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT": "Let's recast every woman as a housewife, while and polite as Donna Reed always glowing on the kitchen set, again....--no lines about a career or rape, again." Or, more quietly, as in "AMERICAN WANDERSONG": "For my parents' exile from their blood-warm rain of Cuba to Madrid's frozen drizzle pinging rooftops the February afternoon I was born. A tiny brown and winkled blessing counter to such poverty that my first crib was an open drawer cushioned with towels in an apartment shared by four families. Such as my mother told me for years, kindling my imagination still burning to understand that slipping into being when my longing to belong first began." VERDICT Submit to the fierce pleasure of Blanco's art.--Iris S. Rosenberg, New York
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from March 1, 2019
The second Inaugural poet for President Obama (the first was Elizabeth Alexander) and only the fifth in U.S. history, Blanco presents a fresh and significant collection shaped by and reverberating with his experiences as a young, gay Cuban immigrant in America. With Walt Whitman's everyman as a guiding storyteller, Blanco charts his own impressive journey, illuminating America's social topography along the way. To find out who he is," he charts who we are." And with each poetic step and breath, he finds the promise, the necessity, and the beauty of hope and a vision of what America can be. This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet. The book's stand-out poems include his much quoted Until We Could, a lyric about marriage equality; One Pulse?One Poem, about the Orlando nightclub shooting; and Remembering Boston Strong, about the Boston Marathon bombing. And years from now . . . / the tender roses you laid across / the finish line, the thankful praise you gave / for the lives that saved lives / . . . the brave / promises . . . filled with anthems sung by you like a thousand / songbirds at once. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
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