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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
The astonishing second collection by the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize
Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself―great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.
Author: Eduardo C. Corral
Paperback Published 4 August 2020 72 pages
“Corral nimbly bridges the personal and political, evoking themes of migration to ask what it means to be unwanted.”―The New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy
“The lyricism of this writing pulls us toward wonder, before, an instant later, documentary fact returns us to horror.”―The New Yorker
“No matter what his subject, Corral is a gifted storyteller, precise and dizzying with his imagery.”―The Millions