Odalisque in Pieces (Camino del Sol) [Paperback]

Carmen Gimenez Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2009 | Series: Camino del Sol

In her debut poetry collection, Carmen Giménez Smith illuminates Latina identity in the prismatic light of postcolonial history, feminism, myth, and the fragmentation of modernity. From these disparate elements she fashions a female persona—“clairvoyant with great shoes”—who is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable. Through her poems we traverse the landscape of a woman’s life (girl, mother, lover), navigating a terrain tinted with mythology and relic yet still fresh and uncharted. The poems revolve around issues of identity—and the ways in which identity is both inherited and constructed/reconstructed. Or, as one poem puts it, “The planet floating backwards / whirling some of us older than the stars, some of us nascent and bare.” Although she employs techniques of avant-garde poetry, Giménez Smith shades and deepens the New World landscape into a territory of rare lyric intensity and energy. Humorous, sly, sexy, sophisticated, these poems are animated by passion and hard-won knowledge.

In these poems we encounter such strange beauties as a girl assembling and disassembling, a moth trapped in a glass of water, new-age fairy godmothers, and a lark who sings for the milkman. Yet we are also made aware of how these beauties reflect the speaker’s troubles—her effort to employ, in the words of one of her most memorable poems, “Only the invisible post where she writes the encounters / with air’s lusters. Only the imagined hour / with which she’s made a fragile craft.”

Vivid and charged with an inner light, these are poems that linger and expand in the mind and memory.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Carmen Giménez Smith arrives in the poetry world fully formed, and dazzling.  Her work is strange, incantatory, but also full of story, innuendo, confession, praise. Although each line, each image, is original, memorable, and distinct, the accumulation of music and meaning that becomes the whole of this book is a great accomplishment. Odalisque in Pieces renews our sense of what a collection can do. This is a poet of mystery, power, and also ancient wisdom: ‘Moths are often still. / Give me a moth and a shred of black silk, / and I’ll show you history.’  Carmen Giménez Smith brings us news both of this world, and the one before it.” —Laura Kasischke, author of Lilies Without

“Odalisque in Pieces pitches its tent on that fertile border where language means (often with an engaging inner logic of its own) or where the poem mostly ‘holds itself upon its sounds.’ Put another way: Giménez Smith is promiscuous when exploring the best our poetries make available to anyone fearless enough to move beyond their comfort zones. This work is ‘mumbled indecency of the sweetest kind.’” —Francisco Aragón, editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry

About the Author

Carmen Giménez Smith is an assistant professor in the English department at New Mexico State University, editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol, and publisher of Noemi Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816527881
• ISBN-13: 978-0816527885
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.3 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,471,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 'I'll find it. My kind always does.' January 29, 2010

By Grady Harp HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Carmen Giménez Smith is a poet new to this reader ...until now...until ODALISQUE IN PIECES leaped off the pages and burrowed into the psyche, unveiling with even the 8th veil the woman who has become all women. She seems to cherish playing with words, words that at times seems disparate and even haphazard until you realize she is playing with your mind, painting surreal images that poppingly become real. In this first major collection she takes us through the hormonally charged paths that lead from childhood to lover to mother/wife and pauses at each interval transformation to seduce us with the feelings and responses that so particularly belong to each phase of being so alive.

But she also can share microcosms of feelings in a few words. In 'Pillow Talk' she writes:

I am odalisque in pieces,
Frisson should happen every single time,

but is doesn't. Instead it stammers
like a bike light.

You promise postcards
from the Atlantic Mirror,

then leave scarabs under
your thumbprint.

My gypsy window:
your fissure.

Listen, I got here
the same way you did,

taking heart in a stranger
who plucked music from my pudendum,

so make me something true
before you go. Or don't.

I'll find it.
My kind always does.

Welcome to the graceful and sensual word of Carmen Giménez Smith. She is a poet here to stay. Grady Harp, January 10

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't read like a first book. Highly recommended. November 19, 2009

By Poetry Lover

Format:Paperback

Amazing, especially if you consider that this is the poet's first book. These poems and this poet's unforgettable voice carry more than assurance: they are dangerous. The first poem begins, "Once when I was harmless..." and it is thrilling to consider the unstated promise that these poems, now capable of harm (that is, disturbance and disruption), will alter you forever. And as you continue reading, Gimenez Smith delivers. It's impossible to read this book and remain unchanged. I never write these reviews, but I had to recommend this one highly. An important book.