TITULADA
elena minor remembers the city as its traffic breaks,making gaps for words to stretch [collude] pop. Flows out of its limits into a great expanse, where contrasts bulwarking thought threaten to slide away. Her poems warm, uncoil, slither across the page; only to cycle back cold as a desert night. Corrientes de sangre, sendero seco. What’s left? Some rattling west. And this body wanting to confide in you: “bone breathe down.”
elena minor‘s work is informed by a basic curiosity about the mystery of language—the paradox of spaces and symbols—how we can never say what we really mean but keep trying anyway. Her fiction and poetry have been published in more than two dozen journals, including Jacket2, MAKE, Switchback, Shadowbox, RHINO, Mandorla, Hot Metal Bridge and Puerto del Sol. She’s a past first prize recipient of the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize, founding editor & publisher of PALABRA and a veteran arts administrator. She also teaches creative writing to high school students.
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Letras Latinas interview with elena minor
Commemorating the release of TITULADA—the new title in our Akrilica Series, which is a joint project of Noemi Press and Letras Latinas—the Letras Latinas blog posted this illuminating interview with elena minor conducted by poet ire’ne lara silva.
I don’t think of my work as ‘experimental’. The word implies a theoretical framework that is not my starting point. That said, though, I do consider my work “exploratory” because that’s what I do with language – explore its possibilities – mostly in a never-ending attempt to explain the why of the world to myself. I start wherever and however the feeling, notion, idea starts and let that carry the weight of words, form and sound. I love sound in poetry, especially rhythm and cadence. Sometimes I let them carry the poem to the point where they are as much the sense as the form of the poem.
Read the full interview at Letras Latinas
$15 Paperback | Published 2014
ISBN-13 978-1-934819-31-9