Tremor

by Marisol Baca

"Tremor is a kiln, a flood, a dirge, and a dream. Herein, you will enter a world of demolition and transformation, a world of resilient women and spirits, a world made of hearts and heart eaters, a universe where meaning wildly detonates and sprouts: One hundred years the grandparents stayed together./ One hundred years on an avocado sofa./ Transfixed on making meaning. In this startling collection of lush landscapes of alfalfa & braids & horses & teeth, Marisol Baca is an archaeologist of the vivid and the revenant, tracing the magnitude of inheritance and the intense irrevocability sometimes beautiful, sometimes agonizing of having a body. What happens when you notice the unwieldy cosmos its births & deaths in your house? In the bodies you love? This. This Tremor everything knotted with memory and destiny; fecundity and loss both coiled in the kitchen, the green tongues of chile speechless in their hands; every life a cosmos, and What is the cosmos but a radial movement outward? Through extraordinary scenes, pulsating language, and an otherworldly emotional X-ray vision, Baca reminds us there is no living form that is not an epilogue for the vanished the ocean was nowhere,/ except in the recesses of their minds and no evacuated form that cannot be restocked with the living nebula [...] mixed up in his hair, her voice filled with weeds, the sound of bees in her ears. Baca s voice is like nothing I ve heard before, is made of the same fire and water that first sparked life into clay. Prepare yourself. These poems are ravishing in their knowing, and ravening in their truths, and we do not know when the ants/ will come and devour everything." -dawn lonsinger, author of Whelm

"Marisol Baca, the dream painter, the undulating desert and shaking ocean caller whose poems here take you under where death delights in New Mexico ovens, green tongues, the whole town crying, and most of all, the tentacular lust of things that no one sees. These poems unwind and disrupt our perceptions of the real and operate in the material of mist, fog, shingles and rats, the teal inkiness in this bowl of space we inhabit. I am caught in her Chagall palette, in her Remedios Varo floating realms, in her fearlessness of decomposition, reconnection and most of all these investigations into nothingness, the inner lining, the movement of upside-down membranes and stray universes. We must notice this in our tiny life before it explodes with one hundred thousand / sterile sisters crawling up our legs. A serrated soul-piercing Geiger Counter. Shattering. Prize. Absolutely love this collection." -Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2018

Reviews

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

If with a finger, a carved-out trembling, some bald youth points to a star from the shoulders of the historian moving them both forward, let what remains of repair glow as in the skeletal lambency of Marisol Baca’s Tremor. This is a carrying and lifting work that recovers the smell of an earth no dreaming keeps. That closes the gap between life and raft. Voice here is a bird approaching the inherited ghost feeder and verse a vision that sleeps in two good eyes. Vessel of the overheard and songmaker of the seen, Baca avoids retelling and gives story a place that allows return. Whether late to footstep or early to the husk of sickness, Tremor is a thing that leaves us for distance might we know, when beached, how softened we were for sea.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way Marisol Baca uses repetition in her poems. TREMOR has this incantatory power, as though in speaking the same words in different iterations, she can will the dead back to life. The whole collection is in turns surreal and matter-of-fact - the effect is intoxicating. I read it all in one sitting.

[Peter J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Personal Highlights:
"Memory of the Card Game"
"We know nothing, really, of dying"
"The Flooding in El Llano"

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely interesting. It was a bit tricky for me to understand, but there were some parts I liked. Love the cover art, it's why I picked it up in the first place.