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Title details for The Blue Mimes by Sara Daniele Rivera - Available

The Blue Mimes

Poems

by Sara Daniele Rivera
ebook
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1 of 1 copy available

Sara Daniele Rivera's award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.
Rivera's poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise—the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 2, 2024

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781644452806

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781644452806
      • File size: 3226 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      March 1, 2024
      Cuban Peruvian poet Rivera's debut collection navigates complex relationships between family and language against a backdrop of Trump-America politics. Throughout the book, the lingering effects of childhood tragedy haunt its speakers as Rivera traces a tragedy, the death of twin sisters, one at birth, the other during an earthquake. This great loss lurks beneath the surface of many poems and surfaces in "Poem for a Scorpio Child," which describes a delicate survivor, "You were whatever an exoskeleton protects. / Soft interiors." Drawing on a bilingual upbringing, Rivera dances between English and Spanish, drifting between languages like castaways over open water: "Mimic me: this is a type of game. / Mimic me: este es un tipo de juego." In other poems, speakers grapple with the burden of diasporic storytelling when language and culture fail, a relatable experience for anyone with immigrant ancestors; "How to be an archive / of things no one / thought to tell?"" Indeed, some of the books most powerful poems depict a father, redolent of aftershave and tobacco, a man both near and far, apostrophized in moving direct address, "you were Cuba to me." Truly an exquisite first book by a promising new poet.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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