Dia de los Muertos

by Gary Lemons

Overview

Día de los Muertos is the lynchpin poem of Snake #3: Hunger Sutras, the third installment in Lemons’s Snake Quartet, being published as its own chapbook/adult coloring book. The poem is based on Lemons’s real, lived experience with a Día de los Muertos celebration in Oaxaca, Mexico; and though history truly comes alive, there is a sense that the authenticity of such a celebration is a thing of the past. Like the bones of a giant beast dug out of a tar pit then reassembled, it must poorly represent the living creature. Día de los Muertos intends to illuminate the dark things that scuttle out of graves carrying pieces of the newly buried back to the world to reanimate with new potential.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597097345
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Gary Lemons studied for two years with Donald Justice, Norman Dubie and Marvin Bell in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at Iowa City from 1971–1973. He has published three books of poetry—the last of which—Snake (Red Hen Press 2012) is the first book of the Snake Quartet. For decades he fished Alaska, built grain elevators, worked high steel and re-forested the clear cuts of the Pacific Northwest. Currently he and his wife, the artist Nöle Giulini, teach yoga from their studio, Tenderpaws.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A deeply engaged humanity and a cast of beautiful, terrifying, fearlessly rendered perceptions of the mystery of being illuminate this sustained soliloquy in three parts, which celebrates not so much the Day of the Dead itself as the internal compass that seeks a true north of justice and the healing power of love. The poet guides the reader, via surefooted music, beyond habit and the shifting boundaries between things, to the place that imagines all places and every time. Here the gods have lost control and an old woman dances in the plaza—letting fly de nadas in her serenade of the ‘elemental needs in search of a bone.’ Día de los Muertos us to paint our own world with its images of turtle and snake, scorpion and flower, as the ringing bell without a rope heralds the new morning. In these poems of unflinching energy and exquisite spirit, surprise is a consequence of living.”

—William O’Daly

“‘Everything in my time in Mexico,’ Gary Lemons says here, ‘lent itself to the understanding that there are no real borders between things—not temporal and not physical . . .’ Not between the living and the dead. But growing up on the US/Mexican border gave me the opposite sense (which basically is its purpose). That Other was terrifying, illegal, and from which so many, understandably, were risking their lives to escape, to get to here. If the border remains in some unconscious way a barrier to Mexico’s soul, well, ‘light / And dark . . . press their flesh / Together like new lovers . . .’ and an old woman dances it, even as the soldiers approach ‘with guns / And promises—both of which— . . . hope to possess the/Spirits the old woman conjures / From the ground with each sandal thump—.’ This magnificent poem, Día de Los Muertos, its aesthetic matching its theme, dissolves any false/unconscious borders that still linger. Mucho gracias Gary Lemons.”

—Sharon Doubiago

“There is an odd equator of madness and song in this shadow decahedron where the fresh ideal of what constitutes solid form is taken up with mapping the other side of the river—here, by the way, the river is on fire and its song is one in which we become ecstatic and must drown. There is concealed in this work a flight from headlines and the sovereign silica. Such edgy and memorable new work by Gary Lemons.”

—Norman Dubie