Today's poem is "Hymn"
from Pentimento
Joshua Garcia
is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024). His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an EmergeSurfaceBe Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
Other poems on the web by Joshua Garcia:
"Turandot Fragments"
Two poems
"Wet Dream"
Six poems
"Self-Portrait with Pelvic Wand"
Joshua Garcia's Website.
Joshua Garcia on Twitter.
About Pentimento:
"Wounds lie at the center of Joshua Garcia's masterful Pentimento. From this scar tissue, Garcia powerfully reclaims the past as an antidote to shame, as proof of survival, in order to cultivate queer joy. Through poems honed by a quiet confidence and masterful command over the braiding of memory, Garcia charts the evolution of self-discovery and takes on Whitman's charge to sing the body electric. These poems are corporeal, raw, aching, bold in their tenderness, gentle in their honesty. This is what I come to poetry for: vulnerability transmuted through language into divine fire."
"In Pentimento, Joshua Garcia fuses the sacred with the secular, moving from churches to karaoke, from Jesus at the gastroenterologist to John the Baptist cruising in a state park, all the while revealing a self and world riven by loss and the remnants of a broken faith. A master of radiant detail, he takes us beyond what we think we see, returning, again and again, to his deft layering of art and myth, to the grace of heartbreak, to the body as first wound and source of all desire. This is a beautiful book and an exciting debut."
"Pentimento is more than a book of poemsthe poems within 'make reservoirs / of their own bodies.' Joshua Garcia's graceful attention to the queer body's task of love has made a collection where we can glimpse ourselves in the messy act of living. 'I like the idea that the whole world is born from a scar,' says the poet, and despite the precarity of these origins, 'let me build my love on yours.'"
Jacques J. Rancourt
Bruce Snider
C.T. Salazar
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