Reasons (not) to Dance

by Jose Angel Araguz

This collection of prose poems and flash fictions imaginatively explores moments of hesitation and celebration. In the tradition of the Latin American microcuento as practiced by Julio Cortázar, Eduardo Galeano, and Augosto Monterroso, these short prose pieces are at turns fabulistic and true to life, making hard statements on unemployment, race, and obsession through characters out of fairy tales and religion as well as history and nature. Through persona and personal revelation, these pieces present the storyteller as world-maker with all the darkness and joy that can be accessed through language.

Genres: Poetry

42 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2015

About the author

José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and, most recently, An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His poems, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, New South, Poetry International, and The Bind. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and composes erasure poems on the Instagram account @poetryamano. He is also a faculty member in Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA program. With an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, José is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


OCEANS

The oceans have not always been here. First, there was a man who grew up feeling out of place, who felt a pain he could not name and could do nothing about. He thought it could be love, for he had seen love acted out in others, but when he looked at the faces he knew, he did not see love. One night, he had a dream where the moon talked to him, called him to sit with her. When he said he could not, she turned away slowly, and he entered a darkness that woke him up crying, unable to move. The man kept crying for days, his tears drawing up around him, lifting him, and when he felt himself rise, he decided to keep on until he made the moon come back, and she did, slowly. The oceans have not always been here. First there was a man. Then there was sorrow.


WILD FLIGHT

Having walked in on the man shaving his face in the men’s room at the park, he stops, feels he should turn away, but then notices the others standing at their business, their backs to this act of clearing some of the coarseness of the body, and before he can feel any more out of place he looks back to find the man different, his hands cupped before him holding what could be a bird made of light that rises and takes wild flight against him, into him.