The Perforated Map

by Eléna Rivera

Poetry. Who guides us through the unknown? Who offers the keys? In THE PERFORATED MAP, Eléna Rivera's guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to. The sentence is filled with holes. What is graspable between self and other? Is not all language in transit, moving in gradations of light, between knowing and the fuzzy conveyance shaped by words whose meaning is a matter of further adumbrations? How are we able to communicate our experience? How will understanding be sparked? What message is there for the poet/the reader? That is what is at stake in these poems, finding the word, the specific word, to illuminate the way, the experience of life, this moment, this time, this period of history.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2011

About the author

Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris. She is the author of Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), Unknowne Land (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), Wale; or, the Corse (Leave Books, 1995), and a recent pamphlet entitled Disturbances in the Ocean of Air (Phylum Press, 2005).

She received a MacDowell Residency fellowship March-April 2005, won first prize in the 1998 Stand Magazine International Poetry Competition, the 1999 Frances Jaffer Book Award, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing 1995. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico.

Reviews

[Andy N]

Not the easiest of poetry books to read, but if you are patient enough with it, it's use of language is interesting and does reward a re-read certainly.

[Jennifer]

3.5/5 stars.

[Elizabeth]

Scarlet
Scar

Imagine the peeling bark
of a madrona

What is underneath:
That huge intrusion