{"product_id":"las-horas-imposibles-the-impossible-hours-paperback-softback-9780816554881","title":"Las Horas Imposibles \/ the Impossible Hours (Paperback \/ softback) 9780816554881","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eLas Horas Imposibles \/ the Impossible Hours\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eOctavio Quintanilla (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780816554881\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 11 March 2025\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e166 pages, 13 concrete poems\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 17.8 x 1.3 cm, 0.313 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\"The time has come for cross-border poetics to become a core element of a Greater Americas humanism. Driven by a passionate devotion to \u003ci\u003econvinencia\u003c\/i\u003e, Octavio Quintanilla's \u003ci\u003eThe Impossible Hours \u003c\/i\u003etransforms the hyper-situatedness of the dispossessed, the alienated, the cursed, into a Cathedral of Light whose dazzling insights splash us with a searing new cosmovision.\" - Rodrigo Toscano, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Cut Point\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"\u003ci\u003eLas Horas Imposibles \/ The Impossible Hours\u003c\/i\u003e writes of La Bestia, the train that cuts off the legs of desperate Latin American exiles, turns bullets into raindrops and umbrellas, and pushes poems around on the page until they become wild word paintings. This book has much to teach us.\" - Spencer Reece, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"I want to think where I'm going will be free of borders, Quintanilla writes. These poems - informed by an artist's eye, the art shifted by a poet's vision - refuse to ignore thresholds, strange angles, and blockades. We lodge in tight corners and find prayers emerge from line and shadow.\" - Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of \u003ci\u003eIn Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"\u003ci\u003eLas Horas Imposibles \/ The Impossible Hours\u003c\/i\u003e pushes against itself and ruptures the poetic grids inhabited by beasts, storms, scarecrows, black cows, neighbors digging graves at night, and poems that dismantle the physical and psychological structure of our realities. It invites us to confront our own mortality, and bears witness to the testimonies of rage and hope tattooed on our flesh\/spirit.\" - Elizabeth Torres, winner of the 2 22 Ambroggio Prize for\u003ci\u003e Loterí a: Nocturnal Sweepstakes\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"\u003ci\u003eLas Horas Impossibles \/ The Impossible Hours\u003c\/i\u003e gathers seemingly simple everyday events and objects and elevates them to levels rarely seen\u0026amp;mdash poems, like 'Black Cow,' where the last line delivers a punch not easily forgotten. If this were a meal, the various courses would delight my senses. With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum. I like the playful yet serious tone that disarms and allows the messages in the poem to sneak in and reverberate in the reader's mind.\" - Norma E. Cantú , author of \u003ci\u003eChicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"When you enter \u003ci\u003eLas Horas Imposibles \/ The Impossible Hours\u003c\/i\u003e, you step into a language-built landscape, a witness summoned by the trickster of art that will not conform to genre. Here, the reader is invited to inhabit a world both familiar and estranged, where the personal and the collective intertwine in luminous, haunting images, and poetry becomes both vessel and voyage.\" - CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor \u003ci\u003eCascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eLas Horas Imposibles \/ The Impossible Hours, \u003c\/i\u003eOctavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems- or frontextos- that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker's sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker's secret thoughts. Haunted by loss - of parents, of children, of the self - the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: \" [A]nd sometimes it's hard to know \/ on which side of the river I stand.\"  Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLas Horas Imposibles \/ The Impossible Hours \u003c\/i\u003eis more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity  it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"The University of Arizona Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52570058031384,"sku":"9780816554881","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/las-horas-imposibles-the-impossible-hours-paperback-softback-9780816554881","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}