Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours

In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
 
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.
 
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.