About This Title
In The Persistence of Objects Richard Garcia gives us a poetry rich in the surrealist and humanist traditions - these are poems with wit, intelligence and heart. In Garcia's poems, historical figures such as George Washington, Squanto and Ponce De Leon pop in as ancestors and guests. Such moves illustrate Garcia's belief in memory as a continuous reciprocal creation. A core of love poems threads through the book, often in the form of Spanish style sonnets. Garcia's poems are rife with surprises and fables that upend the status quo, rendering up our secrets with comic irony and tragic poignancy.
At the Formosa Café
Our booth so dark, the waitress brings a flashlight
with the menu. If I whispered
that her waist is a fragment of a statue,
still standing after some catastrophe,
would you know it's your waist I'm dreaming of?
Tell the waitress we want that bird, that one,
there in the bamboo cage, that sings so sweetly
only those songs it manages to steal.
Meanwhile the famous ones pinned to the walls,
the famous dead who sat in these same booths
know what we don't know yet--you and I--
we're going to fall down on our backs
remaining as we have fallen, wondering--
what happened to that sky we once believed in?
© BOA Editions, Ltd 2006
Available editions:
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-929918-84-3
Price: $15.50
Publishing Date: October 2006
