Angela Peñaredondo

ISBN | 9780997093216

90 pages | $15

2017 | Inlandia Institute

Cover Art : Mike Saijo and Angela Penaredondo

Cover Design: Lawrence Eby

Angela Penaredondo’s debut collection of body/migratory/incantatory poems, explores the alchemy and ritual of poetics that stem from the space of in-between or realm of intersections. These are grey zones where energies that lie opposite on the same spectrum finally collide and intermingle:  the intellect and the sensual, the profane and the holy, love and violence, memory and erasure. Here, there are no geographical or cultural boundaries marked, no sides chosen, only a maneuvering through, a queering of, and a resisting to. All Things Lose Thousands of Times are feminist-oriented poems investigating where fragments of the body’s memory, culture, gender and desire gather, then piece themselves together to form into new shapes: a hybrid woman, a female assemblage, a history palimpsest, a transnational body.

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Praise

Multi-sensory voyager - sculptor of love and painter of concept and delirium, a choreographer of space and a duende-splicer between Baudelaire, Lorca and Strauss. Angela is somewhere in there, cinematic; a Casanova pin-stripe suit, then a flaring thigh, then a topaz sari. I find Peñaredondo a most accomplished poet, a devouring mind and most of all, a deep, intimate observer touching the big bright, dark worlds — their wounds and miracles. She says, "I want to be that kind / who walks through a wall of fifty lives." Indeed she possesses this kind of power. A genius at work.

                 —Juan Felipe Herrera

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The poems in All Things Lose Thousands of Times aptly tell a transnational coming of age story, a becoming from the savage and the fertile, the urban and the fantastic, where "heaven comes after collision." This is a stunning debut for Peñaredondo, poems that shimmer with dense and riveting lyricism.

                  —Carmen Giménez Smith

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Elastic, dimensional, all-together convincing, Angela Peñaredondo’s debut All Things Lose Thousands of Times wields the language as a mountain wields a storm, in phrases that pivot, reverse, wander, tighten, leap and fall through geographies of the body, an inward archipelago of experience, individual and collective, all past and flooded, all future and on fire, bearing unflinching witness to courage, revelation and sexuality, to life and to the lives of women where "their mothers have turned into mangroves" and where "her father found us / as I knelt before her, knees / on church-cold tile." A profoundly alert and loving book that sings and celebrates the cosmic interplay of forms. This is what poetry can do. I feel rescued by it.

                    —Chad Sweeney

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A luminous and timely book of migratory poetics that gathers in the body, no matter how impossibly marooned, the mouth of the lyric I. Drawn from the compression of loss, "…beyond the clenched doors, the perfume/ of starved flowers." Peñaredondo’s speaker seeks in the "…web of wetness, what…has been written out." The poet’s collapsing of cultural dimensions into the weight of traveling through an embodied history and present reveals an urgent landscape (of war, of art, of nature, of people) of the inevitable and the incommensurable: "I’d rather be whoever bathes/in the monsoon, knees swaying—/unequaled. Wanting allows gospel…" Peñaredondo’s truth brilliantly explores precariousness, revealing the need to move at its edges, and to escape, into "husk" and "crystalline pictograph"—"I came back not to regret/ or ask the particulars why I left./ When a tree falls, its roots/ aim jagged, pointing/ in all directions…

                 —Ronaldo V. Wilson

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