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Wild Invocations is that moment that happens sometimes at a bombazo when you realize that you’re watching a woman dance, but also witnessing the dancing of all the generations who meet inside her. And that their dancing is filled with both a listening for the routes and a burning of the routes. History blooming and being ravaged all at once. These poems are, for me, that moment: Mighty and elemental, inventive and imaginative-with an ear to the drum. They are fierce in their ability to render the catastrophes while simultaneously surviving them. Here Ysabel Gonzalez chooses to ruthlessly start / from the scratchy / throated beginning. She writes: Mother, teach me // teach me to unleash / unravel a memory / memory which kills a head. This book is urgent, prayerful, fight-full. Alive. Every word and breath here is a mind willing itself to live. We are so lucky for this poet in the world.
-Aracelis Girmay, award winning poet and author of the children’s book Changing, Changing, and the poetry collections Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, and The Black Maria.
We look for ways to make magic, the poet declares. These poems offer those ways, retracing the geography of the body, ancestry, and history. Throughout the collection, Gonzalez does not flinch but is uncompromising in her gaze. Her poems examine power imbalances present in personal relationships and in society; they tackle head-on intersections of race and gender and the complexities of desire, mental illness, and abuse. Through incantation and ‘wild invocation’ indeed, Gonzalez’s poems are a paean to the ‘heightened bruise’-testament to what ‘we unlearn by being undone’ and testifying to the spirit and will to endure.
-Shara McCallum, award winning poet and author of the poetry collections The Water Between Us, Song of Thieves, This Strange Land, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, and Madwoman.
Joy. Sorrow. Rage. Redemption. It’s all here in Ysabel Y. Gonzalez’ wild debut. At turns elegiac and celebratory, Gonzalez is a poet of tremendous conscience, courage, and corazon. Fleekdom, for real!
-John Murillo, award winning poet and author of Up Jump the Boogie, and the f orthcoming Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry.
