Full Description
Aflame with desire, the eye conjures, dreams, invents itself, sees what it wants. The eye sees what it is able to see.
Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat brings into sharp relief the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language.
With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos's poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house's furniture. Light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish. Alejandra Quintana Arocho's sensitive English translation renders the stark force of these poems without smoothing over the language of the original.
This collection is for anyone who has felt the weight of beauty that remains hidden. It is for those who have left behind a mother, a father, a country. It is for those who know that there is no way out of the poem, for those who have had to live off a house of words and need that house to be as real as possible. Pintado Burgos writes as a woman, exile, daughter, sister, lover, and artist empowered by the restorative potential of the creative phenomenon.
Contents
Still Life
Eye in Heat
Raining, Outlined
The Tide
The Contortionist
Knife-Girl
A Girl Who Looks Like Me
Order
An Event
Poem for the End Times
My Father Says
So She's Not Seen
Still Life
Like a Girl
Landscape
Shooing Some Birds
Get dressed...
Purple
Walmart
Simple Animal
The Key
Ashes
An Ocean-Like Effect
The Beach
His Smile is a Magnet
Around the Bush
It Rains
Sunday
Before the Wind
The Sex of Plants
The Sheerness of the Tree
Bending My Root
Overanimal
Lake Pain
On Statues
Xerophytes
I Dream of My Grandmother
Little Girl
His Smile is a Magnet
A Dot on the Map
Fictional Deer
An Island
That I Tremble
Cruel
Censorship
Broken Branches
Unfinished Project of Ruins
I Drank from Your Fountain
