Flood Bloom

by Caroline Cabrera

Instead of a big bang, Caroline Cabrera’s Flood Bloom begins with a powder keg, and the “I” and “you” of the resulting poems embrace their instincts to research their often-textual, often-spatial universe (“a fluffy architecture / I am only imagining gulls flying through”), seeking “proof by transitive reality.” While the book ends with the discovery that “I am certain we are everything we think,” in between we watch the many constructions of dioramas and “simple machines” as finite models of the infinite, personal models of the universal. This book is smart, super fun, sometimes wild, always brilliant.

Bruce Covey

Caroline Cabrera’s Flood Bloom sparks with generosity. We’re welcomed into a version of this world that amplifies the one we ordinarily inhabit.

Cabrera lets us have magic, she lets us levitate, she gives us a little sleight of hand. These poems are a great, truly melded, mighty mixture of what is seriously impossible to get at, and what moods and manners let us compensate for impossibility; there’s wit, scorching intelligence, precision, love of handling words, syntax and sonics; there’s heart, compassion, empathy, imagination, invitation. This is an incomparably strong debut.

Dara Wier

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

First published December 26, 2012

About the author

Caroline Cabrera was born in Pembroke Pines, Florida and holds degrees from Stetson University and the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of the chapbook, Dear Sensitive Beard (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). She works as chapbook editor at Slope Editions Publications and currently lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

from Flood Bloom by Caroline Cabrera:

Picture of Your Grandma's Favorite Tree

You weren't my friend,
you were

only my brother.
We weren't a family, we

were just a group of people.
That wasn't your grandmother's favorite tree,

it was the only one she remembered.
It was a whole row of trees.

It led to a pond
or it didn't,

how could I know—
I'd only been there at dusk,

and the fog was so thick,
and you pulled me back to the house

by my hair,
in a gentle way, though.

We were playing pony.
These things are hard to remember.

I know very little
about navigation.

I know that the pond that wasn't there
is here now.

Look at the other side.
That's not a rowboat, it's a log.

That's not a trumpet,
it's a swan.

[Biscuits · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. I feel like a lot of people, often myself included, aren't paying attention to this weird awesome world around us. Cabrera isn't one of those people. She hopped off the conveyor belt of life and THANK GOODNESS.