Carmen Giménez Smith

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.

Poems

Be Recorder

Cruel futures

Camille T. Dungy

Emily Pérez

Nancy Reddy

Poets Writing Motherhood

Long Devotion

John M. Chávez

Poetry. Fiction. Drama. Latino/Latina Studies. Edited by Carmen Giménez Smith, with John Chávez. The contemporary literary moment the anthology ANGELS OF THE AMERICLYPSE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW LATIN@ WRITING attempts to capture is one defined by diversity, various points of view, literary styles and voices, topical concerns, and senses of self. Not only have these writers widened the field, they have forged new inquiry into their own experiences of the world, as they live in it and understand it. Writing in forms of lyric, short short fiction, nonfictional prose, and in various degrees and forms of experimentation, this collection represents one of the first efforts, in years, to include a critical introduction to the writers' poetry or prose, their literary work, and their own aesthetic statements meant to express their distinct literary presence in American letters.

An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing

Angels of the Americlypse

This distinctive collection introduces a new type of mythmaking, daring in its marriage of fairy tale tropes with American mundanities. Conspiratorial, Goodbye, Flicker describes the interior life of a girl whose prince is a deadbeat dad and whose escape into a fantasy world is also an escape into language, beauty, and the surreal.

Goodbye, Flicker

Adding to the Latina tradition, Carmen Giménez Smith, politically aware and feminist-oriented, focuses on general cultural references rather than a sentimental personal narrative. She speaks of sexual politics and family in a fierce, determined tone voracious in its opinions about freedom and responsibility. The author engages in mythology and art history, musically wooing the reader with texture and voice. As she references such disparate cultural figures as filmmaker Lars Von Trier, Annie from the film Annie Get Your Gun, Nabokov’s Lolita, Facebook entries and Greek gods, they appear as part of the poet’s cultural critique. Phrases such as “the caustic domain of urchins” and “the gelatin shiver of tea’s surface” take the poems from lyrical images to comic humor to angry, intense commentary. On writing about “downgrading into human,” she says, “Then what? Amorality, osteoporosis and not even a marble estuary for the ages.” Giménez Smith’s poetic arsenal includes rapier-sharp wordplay mixed with humor, at times self-deprecating, at others an ironic comment on the postmodern world, all interwoven with imaginative language of unexpected force and surreal beauty. Revealing a long view of gender issues and civil rights, the author presents a clever, comic perspective. Her poems take the reader to unusual places as she uses rhythm, images, and emotion to reveal the narrator’s personality. Deftly blending a variety of tones and styles, Giménez Smith’s poems offer a daring and evocative look at deep cultural issues.

Carmen Giménez Smith

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