Guillotine: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781644450307)

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

The astonishing second collection by the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize

Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal's lingering scars, the border itself--great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?

In the sequence "Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels," with Corral's seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral's place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.

Author: Eduardo C. Corral
ISBN-10: 1644450305
ISBN-13: 9781644450307
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 08/04/2020
Pages: 72
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.90w x 0.30d
Award: National Book Awards - Nominee

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 06/15/2020
Library Journal 08/01/2020 pg. 70