Details

ISBN-10: 1948579286
ISBN-13: 9781948579285
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publish Date: 10/11/2022
Dimensions: 8.30" L, 5.40" W, 0.30" H

We Borrowed Gentleness

Paperback

Price: $17.95

Overview

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction–through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history.

The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope.

By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men–in the structures that they design and maintain.

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Reviews
"In these beautiful, deceptively complex poems, J. Estanislao Lopez meditates on anger and love, on the intricacies of metaphor and its failure to address our most urgent concerns. Here, the drama of individual experience–of the everyday, of parents and daughters, of race and nationality–plays against the vast backdrop of history. Here, Lopez considers the forces of injustice and truth, in which beauty and danger co-exist inextricably, over generations. This is a profound and important first book from a poet who is here to stay."

–Kevin Prufer

"The speaker in 'Theodicy Written in the Occupied Sands' directs our attention toward 'an old historian pointing to a wound/convinced it spills not blood, but light.' Throughout his stunning debut, We Borrowed Gentleness, Lopez writes in the ink of that spilled light, examining lineage–be it historical, political, familial, religious–in order to mediate conflicts between public record and personal memory. With each poem, another hierarchy is destabilized, but with such instability, there is always a grounding force–the natural world. Along with the various emotional registers of this collection, there are also compelling formal properties, as well as an enormous care for language. Ultimately, this is a collection of finding the divine where you would think there would be none."

–Iliana Rocha

"In We Borrowed Gentleness, J.E. Lopez meditates on the ouroboros of time and its brutal cycles, echoing from father to father through generations. A meditation on masculinity, fatherhood, and memory, these poems weave a gentle web through time and space to suspend the violences within. From how to explain the silence of god and the indifference of the universe to a child in 'Astrophysics' ('Some nights, we read / from her favorite astronomy book. / I struggle to explain the difference / between bodies and dust') to the thread of consciousness that connects a child's witness to a son's compassion for his father in the face of his sins, this book is grounded in familial intimacy, expressed through the land and its ancestors, its history and creatures. The brilliance of this book is how the voice is always locating itself somewhere between father and son, child and man, husband and what husbands do in the dark, god to child, child to animal. Through this tension, Lopez shows us how power is terrifying to hold, how tender a child's world is, how vulnerable one must be to take the lessons of history, to 'converse with Time, whose advice never changes. Who only ever says, forget.'"

–Vanessa Angélica Villareal

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Details

ISBN-10: 1948579286
ISBN-13: 9781948579285
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publish Date: 10/11/2022
Dimensions: 8.30" L, 5.40" W, 0.30" H
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