Imaginary Animal

Poetry. California Interest. Latino/Latina Studies. 2014 Grand Prize Winner for Poetry, Willow Books Literature Awards. "This isn't just a scientific question, but a poetic one: How does the body make sense of data? IMAGINARY ANIMAL is a compendium of lyric fragments of memory, fact, desire, the sensual and the sensory. While we're conditioned to distort or completely tune out the role of immigrant workers in the United States, the untitled lyrics of IMAGINARY ANIMAL are precisely calibrated to recognize and meditate upon a nations laborers. The poems are energized by voice, perspective and consciousness. which are constantly shifting and transforming. While America, with its terabytes-per-second flow of information, largely constructs a single narrative of immigrant workers, this book stitches together a very sophisticated portrait juxtaposing the public and the private, the imperative and the interrogative. There are beautiful, subtle recurrences of deployment (military perhaps), directions on how to reap vegetables, border crossing that provide a kind of cinematic metronome to the poems. They anchor the dream of the IMAGINARY ANIMAL. The title comes from the Raul Zurita epigraph: 'Hoy laceamos este animal imaginario / que correteaba por el color blanco' or 'Today we tie up this IMAGINARY ANIMAL / that ran freely through the color white.' The Animal is the human; and the imaginary of the title is the American Imaginary. This is an ambitious and loving attempt to make us see both with profound complexity and a greater sense of justice." Patrick Rosal"