Emma Trelles's Blog
March 20, 2015
On Cuba: 12 Notes at the Crossroads
Here's the first part of an essay I wrote a few months ago for the Best American Poetry blog about recent Cuba news, and what it might mean to our diaspora.
1. After an entire lifetime in South Florida, I now live 3,000 miles away on the central coast of California, in a small city ringed by mountains and bordered by a Pacific which appears paler and vaster than the Caribbean-Atlantic I have always known. This is where I hear that the Cuban embargo is unraveling, the news a fragment floating from my car radio right before I turn off the ignition to trundle groceries from the trunk to our garden apartment. The U.S. will further ease travel restrictions to the island, open an embassy, lift some trade and banking sanctions. It is as if a mythic bird has winged overhead and I’ve only caught a glimpse of a few bright feathers. My first thought is what was that? It doesn’t really register.
Read the rest here.
1. After an entire lifetime in South Florida, I now live 3,000 miles away on the central coast of California, in a small city ringed by mountains and bordered by a Pacific which appears paler and vaster than the Caribbean-Atlantic I have always known. This is where I hear that the Cuban embargo is unraveling, the news a fragment floating from my car radio right before I turn off the ignition to trundle groceries from the trunk to our garden apartment. The U.S. will further ease travel restrictions to the island, open an embassy, lift some trade and banking sanctions. It is as if a mythic bird has winged overhead and I’ve only caught a glimpse of a few bright feathers. My first thought is what was that? It doesn’t really register.
Read the rest here.
February 4, 2013
Boxcar Poetry Review: First Book Poets
The Art of Conversation: Justin Petropoulos and Emma Trelles
Justin Petropoulos: One structure in your work that caught my attention is litany. There seems to be a drive in Tropicalia to catalogue landscapes, emotions, histories, and so my question is why is litany so important to you as a poet? Among the themes active in the book, religion seems to be one that you confront often, even if just to dismiss it, and I was also wondering if litany was in some way representative of that struggle?
Justin Petropoulos: One structure in your work that caught my attention is litany. There seems to be a drive in Tropicalia to catalogue landscapes, emotions, histories, and so my question is why is litany so important to you as a poet? Among the themes active in the book, religion seems to be one that you confront often, even if just to dismiss it, and I was also wondering if litany was in some way representative of that struggle?
August 15, 2011
Tropicalia reviewed in Post No Ills Magazine
Gratitude is Another Word for Joy: A review of Tropicalia by Khadijah Queen
" “The beginning should eat the eyes,” opens “How to Write a Poem: Theory #62,” though Tropicalia does anything but. It gives us instead an ultrasensitive pair of eyes in addition to our own—as acutely attuned to color and texture and passion as a painter’s. Trelles writes with a sensibility part emotional and part anthropological, offering a way of seeing first the surfaces and then delving into the poems’ subjects with both heart and precision."
" “The beginning should eat the eyes,” opens “How to Write a Poem: Theory #62,” though Tropicalia does anything but. It gives us instead an ultrasensitive pair of eyes in addition to our own—as acutely attuned to color and texture and passion as a painter’s. Trelles writes with a sensibility part emotional and part anthropological, offering a way of seeing first the surfaces and then delving into the poems’ subjects with both heart and precision."
March 29, 2011
What Are You Reading Now?
BETWEEN THE COVERS: Inside books with Miami Herald books editor Connie Ogle and author Emma Trelles.
“I’m usually reading several books at once because this suits my perpetually wandering brain. Right now it’s...
Read more: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/betwee...
“I’m usually reading several books at once because this suits my perpetually wandering brain. Right now it’s...
Read more: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/betwee...
February 15, 2011
Tropicalia
Winner of the 2010 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize.
University of Notre Dame Press.
http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01471
“In Tropicalia, Emma Trelles gives us Miami—the flora, the fauna, the languages, the interstate. Her poems are luxurious and scrumptious, socially relevant, with oomph and sizzle. The buoyancy of her images and the poignancy of her direct language make Trelles the most exciting poet to emerge recently from the state with the prettiest name.”— Denise Duhamel
February 7, 2011
The Tropical Roundup: At the Best American Poetry blog
Introducing The Tropical Roundup, in which I, at random times, post points of interest that may be thematically or geographically linked. Or, they could be event driven or contain some kind of vital-to-obscure news peg. Said points will most likely be stolen from other sources, such as blogs and dailies, but will also be gathered by scrawling notes on the back of gas receipts, in a fruitless effort to bring order to our blue and green sphere, which is currently screaming off its invisible tracks.
Also, I like lists.
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/th...
November 19, 2010
For the Woman on the Boulevard
excerpt from
"For the Woman on the Boulevard"
by Emma Trelles
You're not really crying
because your car spit Hesphaestus
smoke into the night and is now
sagging by the gutter, are you?
Feeling alone and poisoned
by vermouth and too much
tobacco rolled with the last
bit of spit and a one dollar bill?
Can't deny the veins bracing
your temples and the pending
nightmares of the face, the inexorable
atlas you have read every hour you have
worried every dead and breathing skin?
...
"For the Woman on the Boulevard"
by Emma Trelles
You're not really crying
because your car spit Hesphaestus
smoke into the night and is now
sagging by the gutter, are you?
Feeling alone and poisoned
by vermouth and too much
tobacco rolled with the last
bit of spit and a one dollar bill?
Can't deny the veins bracing
your temples and the pending
nightmares of the face, the inexorable
atlas you have read every hour you have
worried every dead and breathing skin?
...
October 23, 2010
Contemporary Latino poets stake their claim in American letters
In Handling Destiny, his third book of poems, Adrian Castro examines the Yoruba idea that the course of a life is pre-determined and only through faith is one is able to fulfill it.
``One's destiny is completely personal,'' Castro says from his yellow bungalow in Shenandoah, where he grows the backyard sage and star apple he uses for his practice as an Ifa priest and in his poems.
``In the dream I would wash this stone with herbs . . .'' he writes in a title poem that travels between the geographies of mountain and shore as it considers the divine act of writing. ``Now I'd have to memorize these marks / make words then articulate them. . . . ''
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/17...
``One's destiny is completely personal,'' Castro says from his yellow bungalow in Shenandoah, where he grows the backyard sage and star apple he uses for his practice as an Ifa priest and in his poems.
``In the dream I would wash this stone with herbs . . .'' he writes in a title poem that travels between the geographies of mountain and shore as it considers the divine act of writing. ``Now I'd have to memorize these marks / make words then articulate them. . . . ''
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/17...
Mini-reviews of five poetry books by Latino writers
Girl on a Bridge, by Suzanne Frischkorn; Glow of our Sweat, by Francisco Aragon; Boomerang, by Brenda Cardenas, Up Jump the Boogie, by John Murillo; and Handling Destiny, by Adrian Castro.
Online at the Miami Herald: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/17...
Online at the Miami Herald: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/17...
