National Poetry Month at Tulane Libraries kicks off with Cody Smith, Jericho Brown, and Elidio La Torre Lagares. Congratulations, Elidio!
Puerto Rican poet Elidio La Torre Lagares’ poetry collection Wonderful Wasteland and other natural disasters has been selected by Tulane University Libraries to kick off April 2024 National Poetry Month, along with Louisiana poet Cody Smith and Pulitzer Award Winner Jericho Brown. Wonderful Wasteland and other natural disasters was published in 2019 as the New Voices in Poetry Series by the Universty Press of Kentucky. It was a finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry Prize in 2020. [See more information below.]
From the two other selections, Gulf: Poems by Cody Smith, is a coming to terms with the past. It evokes strikingly vivid memories of the author’s early childhood home, family, and culture amid the fragile beauty of Louisiana’s coastlines, in what could be called the northernmost point in the Caribbean. Born and raised near the swamplands of South Louisiana, author Cody Smith won the 2018 Mississippi Review Prize for his poem “Self Portrait as a Liminal Space”.
Jericho Brown is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2020 with The Tradition. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, he is a poet, writer, and educator. In his transformative collection of poetry, he ponders on the complexities of human experience and Black identity, Brown combines several older poetic forms such as the ghazal, the sonnet, and the blues to create his own unique musical structure called the duplex. Brown is a graduate of Dillard University (BA), and the University of New Orleans (MFA), and earned a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston.
Elidio La Torre Lagares is a Puerto Rican writer and educator the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, who won the Julia de Burgos National Poetry Award in 2008 for his whimsical study of flight, Ensayo del vuelo (Flight Rehearsal). La Torre Lagares’s first book of poems written in English follows the author’s firsthand experiences witnessing the devasting impacts of Hurricane María on Puerto Rico. As La Torre Lagares processes the tragic loss of his family, friends, and homeland, his writings offer hope in the wake of disaster. Read this stirring look into a poet’s determination to console their community in the face of great adversity.
Wonderful Wasteland and other natural disasters: Poems: When Hurricane María unleashed its devastation onto Puerto Rico, thousands of lives were lost to the storm in what was the island’s worst natural disaster on record. With so much of the recovery still underway and the scars still fresh, its citizens continue to contend with the reality that life on the island has fundamentally changed.
In his first collection of poems written in English, La Torre Lagares journeys through his memory in an effort to recompose his shattered land. Together, these poems form a poignant, personal account of a man facing the tragic destinies of his family and his country in the aftermath of a natural disaster. For example, the deaths of the mother and the father are resignified as the death of the poet’s personal relationship, which at the same time evokes the rupture between individuals and their sense of place.
Drawing from both American and Latin American poetry, as well as global influences, to articulate a language of loss and devastation in search of a new identity, this collection illuminates a chaotic and confusing landscape that is not only physical but also cultural, social, and political. Taken together, this work serves as a stirring reminder of the dislocation and fractured attachment that speaks to many Americans, including transnationals and immigrants. Ultimately it speaks to coping with physical loss and emotional pain in the face of human adversity.
Maritza Stanchich (University of Puerto Rico) writes: “A quarter century of sustained commitment to award-winning literary writing and production with a keen eye for contemporary San Juan emanates from these pages. Here springs the aching beauty of Elidio La Torre Lagares’ Puerto Rico, a Latin American Caribbean country mired in colonial debt emerging from a catastrophic climate change hurricane, in a mature voice intimately articulating losses made bearable through forging art, personal and collective disasters on the scale of Eliot’s Wasteland illuminated by poetic praxis. Also a paean to formative poets, with echoes of Plath, Stevens, Whitman, Pietri, etc. exceeding the explanatory footnotes, this new addition to La Torre Lagares’ oeuvre brings a trans-American arc and modernist vision of debacle to its twenty-first-century incarnation at the center-margin of failed empire. Wonderful wasteland indeed.”
For more information on National Poetry Month at Tulane Libraries, see https://library.tulane.edu/spotlight/april-2024-national-poetry-month-e-book-selections?fbclid=IwAR3tnBPFSIl33sBGEGQFPf5Cd-_MhuWWFoqjL4PEqZyfqwjDuwq6J9mcUUM_aem_AbnpfVTxqUCadiX3V9L13bQWbeknx0RtfFmz7ybE08vQmT998k8cJIbHwujqFLZh54szA6oUulauZE-jT8hS645n
National Poetry Month at Tulane Libraries kicks off with Cody Smith, Jericho Brown, and Elidio La Torre Lagares. Congratulations, Elidio! Puerto Rican poet Elidio La Torre Lagares’ poetry collection Wonderful Wasteland and other natural disasters has been selected by Tulane University Libraries to kick off April 2024 National Poetry Month, along with Louisiana poet Cody
