Notes From Your Bookseller A tribute to the heart in the written word. In many of the poems, the words waterfall down the page with rhythm; "zinc razz zinc jazz." The images are rich—"a gecko resting on a lemon"—and are the stuff of fever dreams—"the scorpions always arrive at dawn"—as in the book's eponymously titled poem. Love, passion and sexuality are entwined with family and leaving one's home and making a new home. These poems are sumptuous, mixed with grim realities. Once you finish, you'll want to go back to the beginning and see it all for the first time, again.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
The astonishing second collection by the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize
Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.
