Description
- Kind: Chapbook
- Pages: 27
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-42-8
Praise
“Deborah Diemont’s poems are set in Latin America, but they are not tourist poems or the earnest expropriation of experience that comes from casual travel. Diemont has lived what she writes about, and she brings to it, not a sentimental eye, but the educated eye of a weathered love.” —Andrew Hudgins
Excerpt
Retablo
Ferry a snail-sized barge past a body drowning.
Rope your own neck with thorns or red ribbons.
It’s no more surreal or cruel than gods’ decision:
Drive a railroad bar through the pelvis,
Alienate the soul from spine, torso from the leg, but
Keep the woman beautiful, alive to paint
Always two interlocking visions.
Harbor them beneath the beat of wings.
Let landscapes divide, dark and light.
Open up the earth, don’t let it swallow.
Author
Deborah Diemont holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from the Ohio State University. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1967, she grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and Fort Worth, Texas. She has worked as a corporate writer and editor, a cooperative housing manager, a holistic health center administrator, and a bilingual teacher.
For over fifteen years she has traveled between the United States and Latin America, having lived for a year in Honduras and three years in southern Mexico. She now resides in Syracuse, New York and spends summers in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, where she translates exhibit materials for the Museum of Mayan Medicine. Her poems and poetry translations have appeared in Cairn,The Evansville Review, Literary Mama, Lucid Rhythms, The Oleander Review, and elsewhere.
