Nightbloom & Cenote

By Leslie Contreras Schwartz

In Nightbloom & Cenote, Leslie Contreras Schwartz traverses a nighttime landscape with eyes purposefully wide open. She descends into "nightcups of hurt and stains"?navigates rugged territory??where most would refuse to tread. In these darkened depths, Leslie pushes against every uncomfortable edge: personal and generational affronts. She relents, "there is too much to move, that won?t." Yet, she keeps stepping with her gaze focused on what wilts and blooms.In her hometown of Houston, she reflects on both literal and metaphorical landscapes, "where streetlights bust out and stay busted." She?s bold in her witnessing though her poems seem to palpate under her exacting "knife, the sharp edge/ that we use to make something, /Even if it disappears." In this brilliant volume, Schwartz instructs best in how she navigates loss. "Let me walk unsteadily. /Let me lose and lose/my body in parts while I watch and sing anyway." Her verse, though sorrow- tinged??shouts a powerful song of resistance. She bade us sing no matter what we withstand.?Glenis Redmond, author of What My Hand Say?In Nightbloom & Cenote the smallest detail opens a kind of world all its own: ?I am made of those sweat-filled / sheets of sorrow, / a clothesline of flinching blouses / waiting for that slap and back beat / to dry.? I loved this, and I loved also the intensity of being a single person as exhibited in the lyric voice of this work.??Ilya Kaminsky, author ofDancing in Odessa

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0998640468
• ISBN13: 9780998640464
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc.
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"