[ POETA ]
West End Press. January 2010. 80 pages.
ISBN-10: 0981669387 / ISBN-13: 978-0981669380
Cover: "Pitayas" by Pedro Diego Alvarado.
PASSIONATE AND SENSUOUS to the limit of synesthesia, these poems address both the mind and body of the reader. A verbal magician, a show-stopping performer, the author educates, stimulates, and moves us through her realization and empowerment of images. Her love of family, familiarity with death, sexualization of everyday life, politics of liberation--these themes are transformed before our eyes into kindling and fed to a flame of such intensity as is rarely to be found in contemporary poetry.
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Scroll through selected poems by clicking on the images above.
REVIEWS
"The launching of this very young poet is a major event in contemporary American poetry."
Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San
Francisco, Revoltionary Poets Brigade
The words, and images, are everywhere exciting. Sasha Pimentel Chacón will be an essential poet in American literature.
James Bertolino, on selecting the book
for the 2011 American Book Award
"[Pimentel] Chacón understands what it is to look at a thing, watch it, study it, hold it, and patiently keep it in her body until she transforms it into memory. And then, with a skill beyond her years, she takes that memory and distills everything that matters to her into exact and arresting images. These are thoughtful, careful, urgent poems that explore what we take in, what we swallow and how we are swallowed in return. These are domestic poems but they are hardly tame, opening up into a larger world. Her words reach out to touch what does not want to be touched, which is to say that she stubbornly explores what is difficult and painful. She uses words to explore the violent, inescapable, brutal silences of the world around her. . . There is a technical and emotional fierceness in [this] work that is wondrous, uncompromising and moving. It is a book that belongs in every poet's library."
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of The
Book of What Remains
"The image and fact of seeds sprout all over [these] poems, together with eating, appetite, and hunger. Hers is a vivid, vital imagination, leaping from California to her mother's Philippine familial biosphere and back again. Her language is fresh, sharply felt, like the stories of pioneering Filipino Americans whose American struggles the poems sweetly, edgily, violently push off the page."
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among
the White Moon Faces
"She does not shy away from looking directly at the object, and in so doing the poet uncovers its distressing beauty. These poems are not nostalgic invocations of a romanticized ethnic past, nor do they offer a shortcut to a commodified ethnicity made palatable for easier consumption. Instead, the poems are often uncomfortable. One would rather look away, but cant quite resist the temptation to look at the forbidden and distressing images, because of their sheer linguistic beauty and because of the many truths they offer."
Marion Rohrleitner, El Paso Times
". . . Pimentel Chacón. . . has the ability to access the sacred time and place. In this space, the suspended moment in a time of utmost creativity is not just possible but, as [N.V.M.] Gonzalez said according to [Katrin] de Guia, it is the sacred time which enables the people to rediscover their roots over and over again."
Eileen Tabios, Galatea Resurrects
"[This poet] has a powerful ability to convey meaning with little explication. . . She fearlessly paints the truth in its raw form, inundating the senses with a rapidity, grittiness and sensuality that, ultimately, leaves the reader satiated."
Misra Supriya, Lantern Review
SELECTED WORKS
Click on a title below to access the work (external links).
POEMS, LITERARY JOURNALS
"Blood, Sister" from The American Poetry Review (2009).
"Talking Tagalog" from OCHO (2009).
"Abaya" from Blood Orange Review (2007).
ESSAY, LITERARY JOURNAL
"The Falls We Take" from The Colorado Review (2008).
INTERVIEW (by Pimentel)
"An Interview with Philip Levine" from Fresno Famous (2006).
INTERVIEW (with Pimentel)
from The Moe Green Poetry Show on Blog Talk Radio with Brett-Candace (Audio, 2010).
excerpted from "Blood, Sister," The American Poetry Review
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