Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 86
- Language: English
- Date Published: September 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-31-5
Praise
“There is a darkness that Edison never dreamed of,” Jay Griswold tells us in his stunning American Duende. These darkly lit poems expose landscapes of cultural oppression and human loneliness. His voice of exile is “concerned by an absence that is called Artaud,” which strives for connection while also tunneling inward to a core that grieves like a wounded animal (“. . . I cower my animal half/ Who would howl through the sleep of a fishing village”). Yet the poet exudes an inner resilience still capable of “the slow work of piecing a life/ Back together,” primarily through the empathic act of making a poem; he says he is “Writing this because I must/ For the fur-bearing seals and Australian pines, I . . . Writing it for seagulls who burst into flames.” Jay Griswold’s remarkable book, just as Lorca describes the duende, “burns the blood like powdered glass.” American Duende is a war cry of love where, as Griswold says, “the escalators are moving upstairs towards the stars.” —George Kalamaras, author of The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground
Jay Griswold’s American Duende is haunted by many ghosts. We encounter the ghosts of Woody Guthrie, Attila Jozsef, Richard Nixon, Pablo Neruda, Vincent Van Gogh, and a host of others. But most of all, the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca lurks everywhere. Every line of American Duende is bathed in the red light of Lorca’s duende. As Griswold notes, “the salmon swim / Upstream to die, and in every act/ There’s a small fragment of creation.” Yes, just as the title of this book promises, Griswold brings duende to America and to American poetry. Though “There is so much suffering in the world/ A soul can’t contain it,” American Duende shows us over and over that in skilled hands poems can transform soul-grief into beauty and wonder. —John Bradley, author of As Blood Is the Fruit of the Heart
Excerpt
Locomotion
Chaos is my country, land of disjointed things,
A self-portrait with electrical discharge,
And the body achieving locomotion again
For the man who says: yes, I wrote poetry once,
But I couldn’t connect things, I couldn’t
Connect . . .
And the huge angry eyes of the night
Shine on wheat fields that quiver with wind
In Saskatchewan, on runways where third-class mail
Crammed into duffel bags waits
For the last flight out or the Second Coming,
A body that dies of insomnia on the coast
Where a man walking a beach
Bends down to inspect a washed up shell
That reminds him of something vaguely human,
And the bright molecules of the neo-cortex
Light up a city that sleeps on its arms,
Or only a little cafe, where that madman, Tzara,
Is carving a dictionary into free speech . . .
Author
Jay Griswold was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and has traveled extensively throughout the world. He has a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Colorado State University and currently resides in Ft. Myers, Florida. His previous books are Meditations for the Year of the Horse (Leaping Mountain Press) and The Landscape of Exile (West End Press, 1993)