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    Fetish
    Poems

    Orlando Ricardo Menes (Author)

    9780803264915, University of Nebraska Press

    Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2013

    96 pages
    21.6 x 14 x 0.8 cm, 0.132 kg

    "Well versed in the uprooted life of an immigrant, Menes's profound references not only convey local color but also bring the essence of his family history eye level with the reader in these striking verses."—World Literature Today
    "The poems in the collection are powerful, yet engaging narratives crafted by a gifted poet and story-teller."-Mary Alexander, Caribbean Writer
    "With flowing language, vivid imagery, and brilliant word choices, Menes can tell a heart-wrenching story in four stanzas."-Mary Christy, Big Muddy
    "Drenched with the flavor and savor of the Caribbean, Orlando Ricardo Menes's Fetish is a treat for the mouth and the ear, as well as for the mind. Striking characters abound: Zvi Mendel, 'retired tobacconist to Havana's Ashkenazim'; an unnamed female survivor of a prison called 'Den of the Lioness.' Anger at injustice often surfaces. The beauty of the region springs up everywhere. But it is sound that powers these poems, a piquant blend of English spiced with Español. . . . These delectable poems beg to be tasted. To be spoken. To be sung."—Charles Harper Webb, author of Shadow Ball

     

    "Open Orlando Ricardo Menes's exquisite poetry collection Fetish, and you'll quickly see a folk sculpture of Eleggua, though I should warn you. In the Cuban Santería religion, this deity has 101 manifestations, or roads, he may take you down. In this way, he is not unlike Menes's poems, which may lead us, in a matter of pages, from suburban Indiana to Miami to Panamá to Kichwa-speaking villages in the Andes. Although the destinies of these roads offer vastly different insights, if we survive them, there is a sensibility that unifies the whole: Menes does not easily identify with grand ideologies and personal arrogance. Rather, he keeps his eye on those who go largely unrecorded by history: a poor great-uncle alienated from his own family by politics, a daughter with severe ADHD, a papá assiduously mending used furniture, a political prisoner who survives cruelty by caring for the earth's smallest creatures—lame rat, pregnant mouse, chirping cricket."—Maurice Kilwein Guevara, author of Poema and Postmortem

    "Orlando Ricardo Menes's Fetish is a rare work of the American Creole Sublime, conjuring visions of his Cuban homeland as a sacred geography of vanquished mestizo dreams, his Florida boyhood a world of transmuting tropical wonder. At once mythic, syncretic, and autobiographical, transported on strains of epiphanic geomancy, Menes's work subtly presents a new vision of América that Martí, Stevens and Walcott would all embrace. You want to whisper in a fever, 'Adelante!'"—John Phillip Santos, University Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies, University of Texas at San Antonio

     

    From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes’s collection sew together stories of dislocation and loss, of survival and hope, and of a world patched together by a family over five generations of diaspora. This is Menes’s tapestry of the Americas. From Miami to Cuba, Panama to Bolivia and Peru, through the textures, sounds, colors, shapes, and scents of exile and emigration, we find refuge at last in a sense of wholeness and belonging residing in this intensely felt, finely crafted poetry.   

     
     

    <CT>Contents</CT>

     

    Acknowledgments   000

     

    Part 1. Ars Poetica

     

    Courtyard of Clotheslines, Angel Hill     000

    Golgotha    000

    Fetish      000

    Mambo 000

    Maracas of Rain   000

    Aubade: The Charcoal Makers   000

    Zvi Mendel  000

    The Maximum Leader Addresses His Island Nation  000

    Spiderman in Havana     000

    Den of the Lioness      000

    Libros      000

    Refrigeradores    000

    Elegy for Great-Uncle Julio, Cane Cutter  000

    TÍa Gladys, Backroom Seamstress     000

    Zafra 000

    Ars Poetica 000

     

    Part 2. El Cristo de Piedra

     

    Windfall Antiques 000

    Horses      000

    Lalo, Peddler     000

    Television, a Patient Teacher 000

    Sal    000

    Village of the Water People   000

    El Cristo de Piedra     000

    Birthing Adrian   000

    Tantrums    000

    Braille     000

    Pyx   000

    Adderall    000

    St. Joseph River  000

    Ashes 000

    Mole  000

     

    Part 3. The Gringo Called Ñakak

     

    Soroche     000

    The Gringo Called Ñakak 000

    Altiplano   000

    Panegyric for the Condor      000

    The Devil's Miner 000

    The Boy from Chimbote   000

    Parable     000

    Our Lord of Miracles    000

    Top   000

    Toro  000

    Breakfast with Capitalists    000

    Juancito's Wake   000

     

    Source Acknowledgments  000

    Notes for Poems   000

    Glossary    000
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