FROM BEHIND WHAT LANDSCAPE

By Luis Muñoz

Vaso Roto Poetry, 2015

“I am so glad I read this book. These poems remake one’s sense of what a poem can be. They exist at the intersection of memory and oblivion. They are the sip of boiling coffee that doesn’t burn, the dregs of adventure at the bottom of the pot. They are the doctor that prescribes nothing but to whom one wants and needs to come back. A mode of expression that strives to correspond entirely with the poet’s life as a man. All these phrases quote the poet’s own phrases. These brilliant poems haunt me, alter my sense of what a poem can be. What a pleasure to quote this author.”
—Frank Bidart

“For many days I have lived in the poems of Luis Muñoz, who writes of 'Everything that is of the order/ of transience and its knowledge,' of moments 'where the world is missing,' and it has been a vertiginous experience. He makes things do what things cannot. He is a curator of the fleeting, a poet of duration, and of desire that reaches all the way into the dreams of the beloved. We are in the presence again of a poet from Granada, in the new century, and it is as if memory breathes again 'in the bound parcels of the clouds.' Here is a poet who understands the unrepeatability of everything, our isolation, our communion with others, what moves and what resists, eros and the ineffable, and in these English versions he is just as good. He is brilliant.”
—Carolyn Forché

“Never have I read work so companionable and desperate at once. This is what Wallace Stevens would call the 'intensest rendezvous,' the moment when the world finds a silent and sometimes terrifying shape. Only a spirit both fierce and gentle can illuminate experience this way, with such a delicate tenacity. If Muñoz offered me his hand for a walk to Hell, I’d take it.”
— Katie Peterson