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    Calle Florista
    Calle Florista
    Calle Florista
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    Calle Florista

    By Connie Voisine

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This World and That One

    Sometimes you defy it,
    I am not that, watching a stranger
    cry like a dog when she thinks she’s alone
    at the kitchen window, hands forgotten
    under the running tap.
    The curtains blow out, flap the other side of the sill.
    In you one hole fills another,
    stacked like cups.
    You remember your hands.

    Connie Voisine’s third book of poems centers on the border between the United States and Mexico, celebrating the stunning, severe desert landscape found there. This setting marks the occasion as well for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can possibly tell the story of this place?

    In a wry, elegiac mode, the poems of Calle Florista take us both to the edge of our country and the edge of our faith in art and the world. This is mature work, offering us poems that oscillate between the articulation of complex, private sensibilities and the directness of a poet cracking the private self open—and making it vulnerable to the wider world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9780226295466
    Calle Florista

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      Book preview

      Calle Florista - Connie Voisine

      Calle Florista

      Calle Florista

      Connie Voisine

      The University of Chicago Press

      Chicago & London

      CONNIE VOISINE is associate professor of English at New Mexico State University. She is the author of two previous books of poems: Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, also published by the University of Chicago Press; and Cathedral of the North. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

      The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

      The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

      © 2015 by The University of Chicago

      All rights reserved. Published 2015.

      Printed in the United States of America

      24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29532-9 (paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29546-6 (e-book)

      DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226295466.001.0001

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Voisine, Connie, author.

      Calle Florista / Connie Voisine.

      pages ; cm. — (Phoenix Poets)

      Includes bibliographical references.

      Poems.

      ISBN 978-0-226-29546-6 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-226-29532-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      I. Title.

      ps3622.O37C35 2015

      811'.6—dc23

      2014048490

      ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

      for Alma

      Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise . . .

      Gwendolyn Brooks

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Calle Florista

      As Well As You Can

      The Internal State of Texas

      We Are Crossing Soon

      Rules for Drought

      What Is True Is You’re Not Here

      Say Uncle

      New World

      I admit that I believe ideas exist regardless

      Annunciation

      Pilgrims

      Testament

      Summertime

      You Will Come to Me across the Desert

      Gravid

      Midnight in the House

      This World and That One

      After the First Road

      After

      Two Years in That City

      Once

      Psalm to Whoever Is Responsible

      A world’s too little for thy tent, a grave too big for me

      Ambidextrous

      Prayer of the St. of the Hottest Night in Las Cruces

      To the Crickets Which Sing in Unison

      Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

      RIP

      The Altar by George Herbert

      Spanish Language in Mexico, 1993

      In the Shade

      Unfinished Letter to Death

      The Self after Modernism

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      Grateful acknowledgment is due to the editors of the following magazines and journals in which some of these poems first appeared:

      AGNI: "RIP"

      The Bloomsbury Review: "Annunciation"

      Connecticut Review: "To the Crickets Which Sing in Unison"

      Fairy Tale Review: "Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?"

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