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The Wingless
"The utter originality of these poems makes me bow down. Cecilia Llompart's breathtaking instinct for image and intuitive sense of pacing creates poems which feel like magnetic force fields, whole landscapes of perception. A mind is quieted, changed." - Naomi Shihab Nye
"In Cecilia Llompart's amazing first collection, The Wingless, whimsy and imagination are rooted deep in mystery and rise up on sure stalks to flower, again and again, into that most desired and various of blossoms–the one the Surrealists called 'the marvelous.' " - Gregory Orr
"A little smoky and mysterious, Cecilia Llompart's work is lean but full–maximally minimal. The imagination here is vast yet supple, the vision, simultaneously gentle and fierce. Everything her mind touches seems more mystical, more alive. Her poems convey a gratitude, a joy less stated than implied by currents of appetite and love, romantic love and a great wide love of it all." - Bob Hicok
"In Cecilia Llompart's amazing first collection, The Wingless, whimsy and imagination are rooted deep in mystery and rise up on sure stalks to flower, again and again, into that most desired and various of blossoms–the one the Surrealists called 'the marvelous.' " - Gregory Orr
"A little smoky and mysterious, Cecilia Llompart's work is lean but full–maximally minimal. The imagination here is vast yet supple, the vision, simultaneously gentle and fierce. Everything her mind touches seems more mystical, more alive. Her poems convey a gratitude, a joy less stated than implied by currents of appetite and love, romantic love and a great wide love of it all." - Bob Hicok
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
468 people want to read
About the author
Cecilia Llompart
3 books14 followersCecilia Llompart is the author of The Wingless (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014).
Her book-length poem "Wild Vespers" was a finalist for the Rick Campbell chapbook prize from Anhinga Press in 2020, a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Competition in Fall 2017, and a finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse Journal in 2016. The recipient of a Poe / Faulkner scholarship at the University of Virginia, she has also been awarded a fellowship from The Dickinson House, and was named one of two finalists for The Field Office Agency’s Postcard Prize in poetry, as well as one of ten winners in Neat Streets Miami “Growing Green Bus Stop” Haiku Contest.
Her book-length poem "Wild Vespers" was a finalist for the Rick Campbell chapbook prize from Anhinga Press in 2020, a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Competition in Fall 2017, and a finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse Journal in 2016. The recipient of a Poe / Faulkner scholarship at the University of Virginia, she has also been awarded a fellowship from The Dickinson House, and was named one of two finalists for The Field Office Agency’s Postcard Prize in poetry, as well as one of ten winners in Neat Streets Miami “Growing Green Bus Stop” Haiku Contest.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 11, 2014
Gorgeous. In an age where snark is the speak, it's refreshing to come across a collection that is earnest and loving, kind and reflective. That's not to say that grit doesn't exist in Llompart's poetry. It does. But in the form of all human grit; a sloughing off of cells with the understanding that the death of one thing is the life of something else.
Read it.
Love it.
It already loves you.
Read it.
Love it.
It already loves you.
August 26, 2015
One great thing about editing the Tarot poetry anthology is that it introduced me to some amazing poets, like Cecilia. This collection of hers is inspiring and inspiriting--she shows the beauty of fresh language, just what it can do, and the divinity therein. Christian structures are paralleled with manifest deities of the quotidian, the animal, the cycle of the year. Really lovely verbs, descriptions, repetitions, and so much more. I highly recommend this book!
September 9, 2014
The Wingless is a stellar book of poems, one that makes you reconsider the smallest things (the typewriter, a candle wick, the moon, a person entering a room) for their raw beauty, their energetic potential. These are poems full of light and breath, poems that change the quality of the air around them. I can't recommend The Wingless highly enough.
July 13, 2017
I've started memorizing some of these poems. Especially "There is a light..."
just because I want to be able to think of it before I fall asleep or when I wake up.
What else can I say to recommend Cecilia Llompart?
just because I want to be able to think of it before I fall asleep or when I wake up.
What else can I say to recommend Cecilia Llompart?
July 26, 2016
Insightful, charming, precise poems. Favorites: "Sunday" and "What My Loneliness Does" and the series of month poems. Recommended!
June 18, 2014
Excellent. Highly recommend.
February 16, 2017
3.5 stars
I absolutely loved "Sunday" and "This is not a Violin", and I read them out loud countless times. Unfortunately those two were the only two poems that made me really "feel" something - I didn't particularly connect to the rest of the collection (or maybe I didn't "get"them? I'm very new to poetry).
I absolutely loved "Sunday" and "This is not a Violin", and I read them out loud countless times. Unfortunately those two were the only two poems that made me really "feel" something - I didn't particularly connect to the rest of the collection (or maybe I didn't "get"them? I'm very new to poetry).
September 6, 2020
Ethereal and Entrancing: a Meditation on Time and Perception
Llompart's collection reminds me of the clean, lush meditations of Jack Gilbert with a unique windswept eye that like the wind travels through the sky and trees simultaneously observing all things, especially the animals, love, and the eternal ebb and flow of time. This order that is cyclical but not repetitive is what she captures and illuminates as she goes, with a visceral bite here and there like Plath, but with a grace to all experiences and a grandeur that can be but a glance to the sky or the moon.
Some of my favorite lines:
“...like a morning / song in the throat of a bird before / it takes wing from a cage of sleep.”
“She hopes that life is a thing // she can slice open at the round, / hopes that it is fleshy and sweet.”
“There is blood rancid in me that you can not move.”
“Blessed all the debris that waits inside / of monuments...”
“Those who lick their fingertips and / pinch flames out instead of letting wax be wax...”
Organized in four sections, each builds off the other with poise; my favorite is the second: Almanac. These 12 poems drift through the seasons with ease, absent of cliché and full of a strange eternal unveiling as her story intermingles. During and after I was left swimming in a reverie for the months and years as they pass, giving us each their details and nuance.
The ending poem “Interludes” is reflective of the entire work, in that it is gorgeous in its pacing and that the eye of the poet goes everywhere in search of beauty and experience leading illumination as: “...all growth / is an argument / for more light.”
Llompart's collection reminds me of the clean, lush meditations of Jack Gilbert with a unique windswept eye that like the wind travels through the sky and trees simultaneously observing all things, especially the animals, love, and the eternal ebb and flow of time. This order that is cyclical but not repetitive is what she captures and illuminates as she goes, with a visceral bite here and there like Plath, but with a grace to all experiences and a grandeur that can be but a glance to the sky or the moon.
Some of my favorite lines:
“...like a morning / song in the throat of a bird before / it takes wing from a cage of sleep.”
“She hopes that life is a thing // she can slice open at the round, / hopes that it is fleshy and sweet.”
“There is blood rancid in me that you can not move.”
“Blessed all the debris that waits inside / of monuments...”
“Those who lick their fingertips and / pinch flames out instead of letting wax be wax...”
Organized in four sections, each builds off the other with poise; my favorite is the second: Almanac. These 12 poems drift through the seasons with ease, absent of cliché and full of a strange eternal unveiling as her story intermingles. During and after I was left swimming in a reverie for the months and years as they pass, giving us each their details and nuance.
The ending poem “Interludes” is reflective of the entire work, in that it is gorgeous in its pacing and that the eye of the poet goes everywhere in search of beauty and experience leading illumination as: “...all growth / is an argument / for more light.”
January 15, 2019
One of the best books of poetry I've read in a couple of years. Startlingly fresh and unusual poems.
February 23, 2017
"You were what was/ missing. Now, you are/ what has gone missing.// The past arranges/ and rearranges/ the furniture// of this room, and of the next." -- Both intimate and abstract, this skillfully crafted collection insists on a world enhanced by incongruent and powerful re-interpretations, like in Almanac, a long poem that rethinks every month, or Wherever We Roam, which applies a bizarre arithmetic to a metaphorical animal kingdom. Wonderful and melancholy.
October 30, 2019
This is a pretty superb collection of poems. The organization of the book is particularly interesting. There is a poem for each month, for instance. Some of her poems seem both whimsical & dark at the same time, or both whimsical & reflective. One of the better poets I have read in a long while.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews