A fix of ink - Softcover

Martínez-Gil, Cecilia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635340551 ISBN 13: 9781635340556

Publisher: Finishing Line Press, 2016

About this title

Review

"For I am dyed in an ink that doesn't let me die." In a fix of ink, Cecilia Martinez-Gil's second full-length collection of poems, life, death, and desire comingle on the page in passionate and innovative experimentations. In these fully ripe poems, poetry itself rules-it is the meeting place of beauty and intellect, of play and the imagination. Uruguayan poet Martinez-Gil, writing authoritatively and with great agility in her second language, offers hard-earned wisdom and insight in this book, ultimately inviting the reader to believe that " . . . we are desires transpired from thought to life." This is precisely the kind of revelation we most urgently need to hear, what we most need to have our poets fix in ink on the page. Brava, Cecilia! --Gail Wronsky, author of So Quick Bright Things "Reject the angel, give the muse a kick," said Lorca. "The true struggle is with the duende." So when a fix of ink begun as momentary fastening winds up feeling more like a permanent, pinching predicament, it's time to find a way "to gallop and gallop / in an unsaddled unreined flight." Jeremiad becomes journey as inner/outer fragments fly into fascinating, kaleidoscopic, finally blessed iterations. Volcanic, harrowing, painful, playful, full-bodied and also as delicately synesthetic as moments of "suspended lotus, / fluctuating water lilies," Cecilia Martinez-Gil's devastating second full-length first un-fixes on the way to that better, more generous, more commodious meaning of the verb: to mend, to heal, to put back together, as what has been corseted emerges when properly cosseted into "forgetting not / what's to be alive, / how to stay /alive." --Sarah Maclay, author of Music for the Black Room In this remarkable collection of poems, Cecilia Martinez-Gil deftly sketches the genome of human written expression, tracing our creative journey from ancient times to modern places. The cave walls of the past, the blank pages of the present and the digital bytes of the future are, like moth and flame, the siren calls of our imagination. Martinez-Gil artfully captures the eternal tension between void and the human need and desire to fill it, awarding us with a kind of dreamscape where touches of ink fix us in time and place: here, there, past, present, and future. --David S Whitley, author of Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit

About the Author

Cecilia Martinez-Gil is the author of Psaltery and Serpentines, a Book of Poems, published by Gival Press (October 2010). This book was also a finalist for the 2010 ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Award for Poetry, finalist in the USA National Best Books Award for Poetry-2010 and Runner-Up for the 2010 Los Angeles Book Festival Poetry Award. A chapbook version of Psaltery and Serpentines was also winner of Finishing Line Press 2010 poetry award. A graduate of USC with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Cecilia Martinez-Gil has an M.A in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UCLA and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Loyola Marymount University. During her tenure at UCLA she taught Spanish, and at LMU she taught English and Intro to Poetry, as a teacher associate and as teaching fellow respectively. She has taught Spanish and Philosophy, Creative Writing Workshops and Seminars for Middle and High School students. Cecilia is Adjunct Professor of the English Department at Santa Monica College where she teaches English Composition, English Literature and Latin American Literatures in translation. Her poems have been published in Voices, A Santa Monica Women's College Publication, Anthology of Latin American Writers in Los Angeles, Imaginarias: Antologia de Poesia (Ediciones de la Critica, Montevideo, Uruguay), and in her first chapbook Muecas de Fosforo (Ediciones Caballo de Fuego, Montevideo, Uruguay 1987). Her work as a journalist/writer (articles, interviews, reviews and critiques) has been published on several Uruguayan newspapers and magazines (1987-1989). She also co-wrote and played the lead character in the award-winning (SODRE) experimental Video Arte Poesia Itinerarios directed by Roberto Mascaro (CEMA 1988). Originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, Cecilia traveled extensively for South America, Europe and the Caribbean. She lives in Santa Monica, California with her husband, Federico Ramos, a composer and guitarist, and their daughter Magaluna, an emergent singer/songwriter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Finishing Line Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1635340551
• ISBN 13: 9781635340556
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88