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Revelations
With an underlying current of devotion and understanding of the ways we survive both beauty and difficulty, these poems are sensual and work perfectly alongside Quesada's translations of Luis Cernuda.
38 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 19, 2019
Beautiful, haunting, precise, surprising...an exquisite chapbook. From my review at RHINO reviews:
The title Revelations and the cover’s detail from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights signal that Ruben Quesada’s new chapbook will travel in and upend religion. While the collection eschews Bosch’s lewdness, it blooms with the inversions in his garden. In Quesada’s poems, the lyric bursts unexpectedly in the narrative; holy and mundane morph and intermix.
The book comprises numbered poems interwoven with four of Quesada’s translations of exiled Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. The translations—all of poems written in a time of Cernuda’s spiritual crisis—undergird the feeling of unease in this chapbook.
https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/revel...
The title Revelations and the cover’s detail from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights signal that Ruben Quesada’s new chapbook will travel in and upend religion. While the collection eschews Bosch’s lewdness, it blooms with the inversions in his garden. In Quesada’s poems, the lyric bursts unexpectedly in the narrative; holy and mundane morph and intermix.
The book comprises numbered poems interwoven with four of Quesada’s translations of exiled Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. The translations—all of poems written in a time of Cernuda’s spiritual crisis—undergird the feeling of unease in this chapbook.
https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/revel...
May 25, 2023
Ruben Quesada’s poems swirl with characters and colors from “a woman in a green scarf” to a field’s “marsh marigold glaze” to “the blue halo of emerald mountains” to “a girl in a black dress,” while simultaneously underscoring melancholy, loss, and transience. The dissonance that loss can create is emphasized throughout his poems in a variety of unexpected graphic matches; for example, the sun’s penetration through glass is compared to “needles at my neck,” foreshadowing the unsettling discovery of a loved one’s hidden syringe and tourniquet.
Biblical iconography tracks through Quesada’s chapbook as is evident from its title, Revelations. And though there is a fusion of Catholicism’s ideas of confession and communion, there seems to be less focus on communion with God or Christ and more an interest in establishing communion with the most frail, the most marginalized— addicts, suicides, Aids victims—as Quesada constructs screens through which we witness grief.
Quesada’s poems are charged with emotional heft and resonance: in one of his poems, he juxtaposes the announcement of a mother’s death with the deathnote image of “a haze of zinnias hushed in the rain”; and, in another poem, he writes of Rock Hudson’s death, stating gravely “there was no funeral, just a body turned to ash.” Ultimately, these poems are powerful lamentations filled with empathy, tenderness, and witness for their inhabitants—including the ordinary, the overlooked, and the disenfranchised.
Biblical iconography tracks through Quesada’s chapbook as is evident from its title, Revelations. And though there is a fusion of Catholicism’s ideas of confession and communion, there seems to be less focus on communion with God or Christ and more an interest in establishing communion with the most frail, the most marginalized— addicts, suicides, Aids victims—as Quesada constructs screens through which we witness grief.
Quesada’s poems are charged with emotional heft and resonance: in one of his poems, he juxtaposes the announcement of a mother’s death with the deathnote image of “a haze of zinnias hushed in the rain”; and, in another poem, he writes of Rock Hudson’s death, stating gravely “there was no funeral, just a body turned to ash.” Ultimately, these poems are powerful lamentations filled with empathy, tenderness, and witness for their inhabitants—including the ordinary, the overlooked, and the disenfranchised.
August 30, 2023
One of the best poetry books I’ve ever read. I loved how varied the themes of the collection are as well as how beautiful the language is. Truly an amazing collection. Plus the translations interspersed throughout are just magnificent!
March 25, 2019
This book sloughs skin with the sharpness of the revelations. Beautiful poems, and in a beautiful edition by Sibling Rivalry Press.
April 30, 2021
Love the form of his work and the words, the rhythm, and how they're interspersed with his translations of the Ceruda poems. Would like more of both but haven't found them to buy!
October 7, 2023
Drawing from religious art and texts, Ruben Quesada’s Revelations unfolds in a series of elegiac prose poems mixed with his own tender translations from the Spanish of Luis Cernuda’s verse poems. What bridges the distance between the poets’ parallel lives: spiritual crisis. Throughout the chapbook, Quesada takes prompting from Revelation 1:19: “Write, therefore, what you have seen.” What Quesada has seen is “this darkened space” where communion with the Holy Spirit reveals the profane threats to the life of a gay man. In daily life and dreams, the “blood that haunts” is that of the “thousands [who] died” from AIDS and those whose despair does not permit them to “imagine a future” that is not “filled with fear.” Quesada’s poems and translations fully contemplate the crisis of spirit, “the barrel like a clarinet against my mouth.” And in so doing, the poems assert that something more be said of those lost lives and his living. Wrought of “harrowed words,” eschewing those “tired of his story,” Quesada shares with his readers the revelation of poetry, “the means to give … breath” to words “where anything is possible.” As “morning light streamed into this darkened space,” a new faith “surge[s] from [his] mouth.
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February 29, 2024Wow!
March 31, 2021
This one was a sweet score that I picked up during Smol Fair. A pocket-sized gem that dips into the ancient to bring us the current moment. Smothered in angels and crucifixion, a childhood in religion, this is the language of the body and the self. Quesada talks about his Costa Rican-American heritage, societal entrapments, and growing up gay within the confines of a stringent and unforgiving world, but above all is the beauty of discovery, the sensual longings that find a home in the language of our bodies.
Crosspost from The Nerdy & Random Bookshelf:
https://thecoilmag.com/the-nerdy-rand...
Crosspost from The Nerdy & Random Bookshelf:
https://thecoilmag.com/the-nerdy-rand...
August 9, 2019
Ruben Quesada has written a tiny book that busts the binding with powerful, affecting poems. Themes of religiosity, longing, passion, and self-destruction pulsate within each poem. Quesada doesn't write verse for newcomers; anyone who needs punctuation or clean line-breaks in their poetry should look elsewhere. But do read these poems, and reread them, and marvel.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews