Synopsis "Epic Series (in English)"
Epic Series brings together three long poems by Eléna Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. Gathered here are Wale; or The Corse, Unknowne Land and The Wait; for Homer’s Penelope. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where place is continually shifting, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories— histories of conflict, translocation and injustice. “Eléna Rivera’s Unknowne Land is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape—a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of history quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera’s writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched . . . . We are given a contemporary Dantesque work of unique elements held together by spiritual accident and intention—its paradox explored and revealed through the book’s architectural underpinnings and entirely unexpected vision.” —Kathleen Fraser, judge of The Frances Jaffer Book Award “. . . this is a poem of and about extremity, and it reiterates poetry's ongoing role as an extreme discourse of beginnings and apocalypses, strophes and catastrophes. Language explodes or implodes between the double pressures of tradition and innovation. The eruptions and earthquakes and tremblings in Unknowne Land are only the most literal manifestation of this tension.” —Elizabeth Willis, The Poetry Project Newsletter “Quotation or paraphrase are inadequate to the range of emotional reference in Rivera’s book, in part because the emotion accumulates bit by bit—or element by element—as the pain becomes more pronounced (“To reduce the impact, I curl / my body forward”). By allowing that ‘each piece has to be stitched together,’ Rivera advocates a careful reading of the work in its entirety; in this way, her emotional argument gains force and momentum.” —Dawn-Michelle Baude, The Chicago Review “‘Who bears a record of the world?’ Rivera asks as the beginning of the text’s first section ‘Fire,’ and we hear immediately not only the impossibility of a project of such breadth being ‘borne,’ but also the impossible weight of such a responsibility, given the horror of that record. . . . Hers is a language rich with elegiac illumination, ever testing the edges of the illusory. Rivera questions the possibility for any meaning to adhere, even as she entrances us with the ‘rhythm of the pencil’ in her attempts.” —Rusty Morrison, Poetry Flash
