Watchword
/ Poems by Pura López Colomé
In her most recent book, Watchword—the winner of the Villaurrutia, Mexico's most esteemed literary prize—acclaimed poet Pura López Colomé writes of life at its brink with fierce honesty and an unblinking eye. This work shares the darkness, intensity, and skeptical hope of Thomas Hardy's great poems. Like them, López Colomé's poems have flashes of secular mysticism, sparked from language itself, which generate unforgettable passages and give voice to a world familiar and odd, wounded and buoyant. In the energy and intensity of her work and in her exhilarating words, we discover both a line of conduct and the source for a richer life. This bilingual edition features the poems en face in Spanish and English.
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Reviews
By Kristin Dykstra for BOMB
Joseph Hutchison for Cerise Press
By Gregary J. Racz for Review: Literature & Arts of the Americas
By Grant Barber for Three Percent
By John Pluecker at Literal
By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright for Brooklyn Rail
By John Taylor for The Antioch Review
Interview by Grant Barber at Three Percent
Interview by Jen Hofer at Make Magazine
Interview (podcast) by Erica Mena at Three Percent
Interview by Karla Cordero at Poetry International
At Harriett (Poetry Foundation)
At Hinged: Journal of Converging Arts
Pura at Harvard University's Lamont Library
“Widely acknowledged and celebrated as a poet of lyric intensity and concision, Pura Lopéz Colomé here attains a new level of engagement with the poetics of perception in a world marked at once by harrowing personal experience and the transformative revelations of things as they are. Truly a splendid ‘garden / of signs within signs.’”
“Both Dante and Dickinson preside over Watchword, Pura Lopéz Colomé’s brilliant ‘notes that day by day gather / something profound and gentle, eternal, / melodious, imagined, maternal…’ She reminds us just how worldly the otherworldly is. Forrest Gander’s translation rings flawless and true”