We’re wind-worn down to the muscle—
maybe we’re dancing bones. ¿Do you
still dance? This appeasing stray mongrel
in your recollection, at your beck
and call, will be swept off a sandstone ledge.
Look away and there will be
no guilt, no evidence of a fall.
Galería
Edwin Alanís García
June 2019
What drips from this golden-throat is the full goat-song of art and longing…
Joyelle McSweeney
An ekphrastic study of false identities and intransgressible worlds, Galería weaves fictive narratives of Paris, New York, Mexico City, and lovelorn Arizonan dreamscapes—though never truly escapes the ruins of Rust Belt Illinois and rural Nuevo León. What’s reified across the collection’s three panels and myriad personae culminates in a bleak, prophetic unveiling, a lament for a home that never existed.
About the Author
Edwin Alanís-García is the author of Galería (Ugly Duckling Presse). His poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Acentos Review, The Kenyon Review, Periphery, and Tupelo Quarterly. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and is currently a graduate student in Philosophy of Religion at Harvard Divinity School.
Praise
Like the razor blade that slices open in the eye-moon at the beginning of Chien Andalou, Alanís-García’s Galería is a drastic and radiant maneuver. What drips from this golden-throat is the full goat-song of art and longing, the violence of exile and the ecstasy of oscillation in the no-place-like-home. This voltified hyperdiction admixes the language of angels, bosses, and books, the toxic wedding toasts of capitalism, the caked assassins’ make-up of Asco and Cahun. I feel infernally alive in the midst of such Hadean fructification. Hell, yeah.
Joyelle McSweeney
Edwin Alanís-García’s poems are ekphrastic, referential and expatriative – they are poems that wear their mediation on their sleeves – but they also manage to feel urgent and beautiful. This is how Alanís-García proves that the poet is not just a liar but an alchemist.
Johannes Göransson
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Publication Details
Chapbook
32 pp, 5.5 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: June 01 2019
Distribution: Direct Only