Calle Florista
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About this ebook
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.
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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?"