All Things Lose Thousands of Times

by Angela Penaredondo

All Things Lose Thousands of Times is a Angela Penaredondo's debut collection of body/migratory/incantatory poems, exploring 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 of 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 are 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 finally piece themselves together to form into new shapes: a hybrid woman, a female assemblage, a history palimpsest, a transnational body.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2016

Reviews

[jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came back not to regret or ask the particulars of why I left. When a tree falls, it’s roots aim jagged, pointing in all directions.

gift from johan and read in an airport waiting room, all the home comings and goings. In new year-ed way I am poking at where I have been and noticing all that is patterned but also all that is not. Am entertaining idea that the task is not to force order upon

inside your throat, captured / in equidistance, laughter / accumulates and dies

Really winding collection that prompts and reacts to itself. Feels like honing of dark voice // not the wanting to save oneself so much as the recognition that one could be. Quiet year, that voice speaks for all of us. Strong internal song to the writing, called me forward whole time :) rhythm like mom’s Tagalog spun English.

Across the hulk of it all, we want the sky to want us too. And for what sky there is inside us to be devout.

[Wing · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried really hard to like these poems, to at least find a crack in the door where I can find myself in them but I really couldn't. Here and there were some brilliant flashes of language and imagery but there was nothing cohesive there to really captivate me or compel me to fall in love with any of the pieces. Many of the poems felt like a haphazard assemblage of scintillating phrases and odd juxtapositions of words that made it hard to find a foothold of meaning that will attach these words with some kind of moving or personal experience for me.

[Rana Tahir · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminds me why I love poetry; it is its own music.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Met the author in Lisbon many summer ago and this collection is as enlightening and smart as they are! Brilliant stuff here. Highly recommended and praised.

[Miguel Vega · Rating 3 out of 5]

And if you want love
and your hand on something
like a ripened thigh,
you must double yourself.
And who doesn't like that?