Patient Zero
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“I will call the voice of this poet a ‘common’ voice… a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing.” —Philip Levine, Ploughshares
This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices—of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing.
From Patient Zero
Love is a worried, old heart
disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff
blues are made of, real blues
that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk
like the “Okra blues” or “Pay Day blues,”
though I think House would agree
two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,
if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog
bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which
makes me wonder about the source of our disease
and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam
and Eve left the garden?...
Tomás Q. Morín's debut poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 24 free verse dispatches from the markets, parks, and restaurants that form his distinctly American landscape, Mor n (A Larger Country) displays a "wind-whipped, ear-clapped" poetic sensibility forged by daily experience. These affably dreamlike riffs on love, fatherhood, and loss are marked by a deadpan surrealism. Mor n is persuasive when negotiating a longer epistolary piece such as "Sing Sing," with its sweeping lyrical meditations on poetic inspiration, subjectivity, and public narrative. He's perhaps most striking in capturing everyday actions with startling, musical wit: "I found regret in a deli case; it was white and shaped like a brick." In a supermarket queue, he watches as "a hand/ mottled indigo like a map of archipelagoes,/ brushes my lettuce." Learning to use chopsticks, his fingers "stumble across a tiny plate/ with my Chinese finger crutches" before becoming "Fred Astaire on stilts." The stakes are always higher than they first appear and humor serves to sharpen his speakers' underlying concern that "Beauty is for suckers." At any moment the reader can be stirred by Mor n's restless imagination, whether it's his descriptions of "ice-bitten January streets" or "the peacock-black/ of galaxies." In such moments of delicate precision, readers experience the pleasure of watching Mor n construe daily experience in an idiom distinctly and unforgettably his own.
