The Blue Mimes: Poems -- Sara Daniele Rivera, Paperback

Sara Daniele Rivera's award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone--all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.

Rivera's poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English--between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise--the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.

Author: Sara Daniele Rivera
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 04/02/2024
Pages: 72
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.60h x 6.60w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781644452790

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/01/2024 pg. 8

About the Author
Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban/Peruvian artist, writer, translator, and educator from Albuquerque. Her poetry and fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies. She was awarded a 2017 St. Botolph's Emerging Artist Award and won the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry. Her drawings, sculptures, and community-based installations focus on text-in-space as social intervention, and her public art projects are often developed in collaboration with youth.