Strange Signatures: Poems

Paralleling how celebrated artists create and are consumed, Strange Signatures maps a zone of contact between artistic creation and the dangers of identification. A neo-baroque, lyrical treatise on encountering the Other, the poems in Strange Signatures reverse the colonial gaze and transform it into scenes of conflicted recognition. At the origin of the Other is a queer Bluebeard, an emblem of imperialist violence and savage injustice. Resisting the patriarchy and its colonizing powers are Bluebeard's feminist phantom brides, a "bride brotherhood," the guerrilla-muses of solidarity and revolution. In poems that open the secret chambers of individual and collective histories, Bluebeard's survivors continue a phantom afterlife by way of dislocated avatars: modernist artists, estranged Latin American poets, pop stars, a taxidermized parrot and a Peruvian mummy. Strange Signatures is an international, cinematic montage of the phantasmatic and the all-too-real, locating social transformation in memory, crime and the allegorical biographies of celebrated artists and poets. "In these finely calibrated poems, timbre and argument join to evoke Europe's diaspora in Hollywood or the cadence of Hart Crane in the Mexico of Los Contemporáneos. To the degree that Alejandra Pizarnik writes a poem for Janis Joplin and pop icon Juan Gabriel rescues a queer heart from madness, other scenes of sexuality and politics surface, as though to dwell like 'the ghost of Che haunting / The soccer crotches of neurotic boys.' In this cinematic montage of modernity and the vernacular, Ramón García coalesces a mythology of the self by way of figures in history-those phantom limbs that structure the pain and pleasure of a poet's aesthetic understanding of the present." -Roberto Tejada, author of Carbonate of Copper "Ramón García's stunning collection Strange Signatures proves there's little distance between the poet and his surprising art, between self and other, between Time's 'emotional carnival' and the still-unexplored worlds of mythology. Wounded and resurrected avatars glitter with his currency of restless music and imagistic wisdom that match this book's fresh, allegorical intent. García's poems summon the power of contrast: horror & joy, forgettable monster & patron saint, patriarchy & eternal female where no world of language and 'no country is an exception' to the rule of uncertainty. Yet, standing atop the 'conquered past, ' the poet reminds us that we are of our own making. The untamed magic of this book celebrates the personal insight capable of transforming 'conflicted recognition' and collective grief into a liberated triumph of the imagination." -Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous "In Ramon Garcia's Strange Signatures, he's talking music: 'Scaling the lyrics of an orphaned soul' but specifically, Mexico's. His home country lies between the lines, leans into his lexicon, his phrasing, his syntax: 'the distant songs of a tragic land/claim me a citizen.' He's torn by gender too. Bling-crazy polymorphic David Bowie propels the terrific poem, 'Thin White Duke.' Then, with 'the cities and suburbs / stretching before us / Glittering and dark / Like the endlessness of forests, ' Garcia declares 'I renounce all Bluebeardy brotherhoods!' with a love gone bad in Grimm celebration. A worthy and long-awaited collection." -Terese Svoboda, author of Roxy and Coco