Description
Book SynopsisThrough image-rich poems regarding migration, transcultural identity, loss, connection, dream, and aging—some translingual, some ekphrastic responses to ephemeral and surreal works of art—Brenda Cárdenas’
Trace explores conditions of displacement, liminality, and mutability. These poems transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us, traces we leave behind for others to encounter. Although elegy resurfaces throughout this collection as does a poetics of social consciousness, Cárdenas also embraces moments of levity, story, and an effervescent internal music that balance her steps through fraught yet bewitching terrain.
Trade Review"I heard Brenda Cárdenas read from her new collection,
Trace, at The Hungry Brain in Chicago: an incantation, a call to action. By the time I got to the book table, there were no more copies to purchase." —Susanna Lang,
RHINO Poetry
"[Cardenas'] latest book claims an expanded and expansive field of writers and artists (including Lucille Clifton, Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, and Remedios Varo), in poems that go beyond the ekphrastic into the kinetic, the performative, the liminal space of dream and desire. Lines I can't get out of my head: "What can we do with this gathering of ghosts / but welcome them home." —Urayoán Noel, Intervenxions
