For Want of Water
and other poems
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss, from an American Book Award–winning author. Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series.
El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Juárez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina’s life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city—but the breadth of a country—away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much “a body will hold,” reaching from the border to the poet’s own Philippines. These poems thirst in the desert, want for water, searching the brutal and tender territories between bodies, families, and nations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rising from the heat of the Mexican-American border, Filipina-American Pimentel's gripping and complex debut, a 2016 National Poetry Series winner, draws a line between the mirror cities of El Paso and Ciudad Ju rez, while the poet's native Philippines looms in the background. These poems are marked by troubled love and ambivalence, particularly in regard to violence: "We say it's the last, we say just one more./ We say the war we're not responsible. We say// we won't. Then we pull roses, petals leaking/ thread, red blossoming their glass tombs." Such complicated feelings are not for Ju rez alone. In El Paso, "Women and men rumble the distance,/ the television on but politely muted, walls/ glaring with the passing of the unnamed dead." Through Pimentel's gaze, readers are encouraged to see the body as a conflicted space of both tenderness and disaster. She excels at crafting a gorgeous language that drapes around the coarseness of the world; poems that confront the challenging topics of crack addiction, familial assault, and loss are suffused with an almost erotic sensuality. Even the cataloguing of mundane moments (dancing lessons, a Thai massage, air travel) explodes the everyday into a remarkably sumptuous landscape. The thirst to find benevolence inside brutality, just as one thirsts for oases in the desert, runs through these pages.
