Guillotine

“The disfigurement and transfigurement of the body—its simultaneous abasement and exaltation—are crossed and recrossed in Eduardo C. Corral’s series of retablos interrupted by borders, checkpoints, cages. These poems step ‘into the grit / & whirl’ of the desert like a fervent saint: devotional, rhapsodic, divine. ‘Oh Lord, here I am,’ writes Corral, echoing Isaiah, the prophet who called out the inequities of his nation, who demanded that security be granted to the people and that rest be granted to the weary. Guillotine is a timely, excoriating, and captivating book born of perilous times.” —D. A. Powell 

“Notes scratched into a water station barrel, a twisted ankle supported by a belt, and rural, neon-lit gas stations are all part of the Sonoran Desert portraits that Eduardo C. Corral paints like a master artist in Guillotine. Corral proves through documentary poetics and a variety of skilled forms that there is, indeed, a tactile connection between the displacement of the borderlands and shame. Not since Gloria Anzaldúa has someone so carefully connected queer desire with cultural desire, and only a poet as skilled as Corral could connect rejection from the US nation-state with unrequited love to such effect. Carefully code switching between Spanish and English, Corral is a poet to be studied for his radical contributions to the American canon.”—Natalie Scenters-Zapico

“Ravishing. . . . This collection enacts an erotics of loneliness, a deep song of exile, of indefinable yearning. At times, even the text itself blurs. It’s as if I am reading through smoke, through tears.” —Diane Seuss 

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