Description
Book SynopsisIn Jon Pineda's debut collection
Birthmark, loss takes the shape of a scar, memory the shape of a childhood, and identity the shape of a birthmark on a lover's thigh. Like water taking the form of its container, Pineda's poems swell to fill the lines of his experiences.
Trade Review"Jon Pineda's Birthmark is a welcome and in some ways auspicious collection of poems by a young writer who will not be long in making his name and his poetry known. Possessing the delicacy of early James Wright and the improvisational bravura of Forest Gander, Pineda's strength lies in an unusual music and his feel for tidewater Virginia and the marvelous stories it tells him. Among these stories is the beautiful homage to family and the brave character of Filipino culture making that all-too-familiar journey toward new life in America. Birthmark is, like its namesake, tender, bright, lasting, and filled with identity we are called to remark is, if not our own, close enough to feel our own."-Dave Smith, author of The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000; "Birthmark is brimming with a wisdom that seems not contrived from literary ambition, but born of a joy for life quite incidental to such ambition. It is the wisdom of Telemachus, the prototypical son, gained from long hours contemplating the missing father, then reconciling to the father's return. It is a wisdom that begets tenderness, and broadcasts, with strength and humility a vision of contraries reconciled at the core of longing".-Richard Katrovas, author of Dithyrambs"
