Headless John the Baptist hitchhiking : poems

Headless John the Baptist hitchhiking Poems

C. T. Salazar, 1992-

Book - 2022

In C. T. Salazar's striking debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South's historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion ("a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him") eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire.

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Subjects
Sexual minorities > Poetry.
Latin Americans > Poetry.
Poetry.
Genres
Poetry
Published
Cincinnati : Acre Books 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
C. T. Salazar, 1992- (author)
Physical Description
70 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781946724489
  • I.
  • Sonnet for the Barbed Wire Wrapped around This Book
  • All the Bones at the Bottom of the Rio Grande
  • Portrait of the Dalmatian That Bit My Mother
  • My Father in the ICU
  • Traveler but I Scarcely Ever Listened
  • When the Crows Came
  • Saint Toribio Romo of Guadalajara Finally Stopped Praying
  • Triptych Just before Mass
  • Barnburner
  • Mostly I'd Like to Be a Spiderweb
  • II.
  • Parable about Changing My Name + an Elegy
  • It's Easy to Become King of a Place No One Wants to Live in
  • Shades of Red
  • Six Ecclesiastical Love Songs
  • Poem with the Head of Homer in It
  • The Mouse Speaks
  • If a Star, Break This Elegy into Its Blossoming Fingers
  • Incident Number to Be Determined
  • Forgive Yourself for Seeing It Wrong
  • III.
  • Sonnet River
  • Self-Portrait as Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
  • Love, Circular Saw Blade
  • After Us, the Flood
  • Noah's Nameless Wife Sees a Golden Bust of Joan of Arc
  • As Long as You Want
  • Poem Ending with Abraham's Suffering
  • Ode
  • IV.
  • You Called Me Castaway and I Called You
  • Palinode, or Lullaby with Light and Dark
  • Novenas
  • Noah's Nameless Wife Takes Inventory
  • You Are Counting the Waves
  • All That Dazzling Dawn Has Put Asunder: You Gather a Lamb
  • Poem with Three Names of God + a Promise to Myself
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Library Journal Review

An immense tenderness underlies Salazar's standout first collection. The poems probe the ever-presence of history, family, place, religion, and grief insisting on multidimensionality and the complicated ways the aforementioned entwine with us, for better and worse. The poems name the nameless and ephemeral ("I want to tell you how many churches/ I've built to praise little things that deserve/ more than their few seconds of existence"), and insist on remembrance, lest people and pain be erased, as in "All the Bones at the Bottom of the Rio Grande." Transfigurations frequent the work ("like a paper/ tiger unfolding in a field, I am waiting / to be unrecognizable: how could I love you/ in one single shape?"), and this resonant theme buoys the collection with authentic, quiet joy, even amid pain. The collection left me thinking that perhaps everything lost--beliefs, people, strands of hair to a crow's nest--might be returned or found, though in altered form, and in this way survive. VERDICT A gorgeous, open-hearted debut.--Amy Dickinson

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