Autobiography of So-and-So: Poems in Prose (Green Rose) - Softcover

Kilwein Guevara, Maurice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932826164 ISBN 13: 9780932826169

Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2001

Synopsis

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "With a magical naturalism that refuses to separate the local from the global, Maurice Kilwein Guevara's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SO-AND-SO: POEMS IN PROSE holds our eye close to the Western wound: where cultures mix only by bleeding into each other. These prose chronicles reconfigure fixed assumptions about self and enter a threshold past which facts are as haunted as nightmares and consensual reality has become a waking dream" - William Olsen.

About this title

About the Author

MAURICE KILWEIN GUEVARA was born in 1961 in Belencito, Colombia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has received awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the J. William Fulbright Commission. His books of poetry include Postmortem (University of Georgia Press, 1994) and Poems of the River Spirit (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). He is currently Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

From Publishers Weekly

Over the course of 46 prose pieces centering on the speaker's life lived alternately in Colombia and the United States, Guevara works up a self-portrait in which each tale builds off the previous to make an accumulative, unflinching music. The "so-and-so" who emerges in this third full-length collection is a figure who straddles a fence between Latino and American identity, between childhood and adulthood, between First-World amenities and developing-world poverty: "We're stopped on the road from Belencito to Bogot . In the convex sphere of an owl I see my six-month-old body cramping and weak in my mother's arms. My brothers are asleep next to us in the back seat. It's April, the rainy season." Rather than attempting to reconcile the contradictions of the beautiful and grotesque, Guevara allows soot, mud and blood to exist beside "almonds of gold," "that copper synapse" and "my father's box of books" so that the reader is all the more aware of the indivisible pleasures of the visual world. Surreal realpolitik ("In Quito, he becomes the head of the opposition party because the poor are in love with his long, beautiful hands") infiltrates religious, sexual and familial relations, and economic reflections drive the indelible imagery. As in Postmortem and Poems of the River Spirit, Guevara's attention to organic cycles of growth and decay infuses the poems with a tenebrous resonance that always comes ineffably back to earth: "The moon, a corroding disk, streaks down on a filthy miner, sitting, a masked coon at his feet." (Apr.)Forecast: The powerful storytelling and nuanced imagery of these cross-cultural imaginings should draw acclaim if given review attention. Larger houses looking to expand their lists will find Guevara's work a good, challenging fit.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0932826164
• ISBN 13: 9780932826169
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 77