Poetry by George Kalamaras & Alvaro Cardona-Hine
Artwork by Alvaro Cardona-Hine
This collaborative collection of poems by Alvaro Cardona-Hine and George Kalamaras also includes cover art and five additional paintings (reproduced in color) by Cardona-Hine, who--besides being a poet--is a noted visual artist who (with his wife Barbara) owns and operates the Cardona-Hine Gallery in Truchas, New Mexico.
"Kalamaras & Cardona-Hine dance an Aleteo--a poetics of fluttering back/forward & into/ against spiritual paths. The koans of Zen, the parables of Kafka & the doubles of Borges boom-crash & whirl with intimacy & Bigmind--memory, desire & investigation, a mad rush toward the bliss of the Void. Yet, there is a contrapuntal friendship amiably floating & laughing into 'electrical storms' of history. Emperor Mu, Wittgenstein & 'a taxidermist from Toledo named Tom' border-cross into each other. There is love. Suddenly, impossibly--an unnamable someone kisses your hands as you read. A timely & revolutionary collaboration."
--Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems
"We have come to expect that our greatest poets create worlds, but what Kalamaras/Cardona-Hine achieve in these pages is nothing less than the creation of a galaxy, complete with its own interstellar dust & its remarkable star clusters. Quite frequently their poems, creations of quantum entanglement, are like hyphenated beings--not simply dialectical, but alchemical--alive with parts of each other. Kalamaras writes: 'we learned to be two places, live two lives, at once.' There is a mutual hunger. Cardona-Hine is able to say: 'Between me and the other, between light and dark, I devoured the nearest planet, then a galaxy of entities. . . .' This is a starburst galaxy driven by the engine of the black swallowing hole. Omnivorous--chewing on the dark matter & the brilliant light matter--all the eaten stars. Ultimately their galactic journey arrives at the overwhelmingly beautiful moment, the final stunning exaltation, blissfully elemental: 'I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.'"
--Patrick Lawler, author of Feeding the Fear of the Earth
"The Recumbent Galaxy is a duet celebrating everyday contrasts--male/female, here/there, local detail/exotic location--with deceptive ease. Like jazz musicians, these accomplished poets freely improvise and riff off each other's rhythms & images, creating a work in five movements that circumnavigates human emotion & the differences between us. From Cardona-Hine's Borges-like prose poems in 'The UncertaInty PrIncIple' to Kalamaras' couplets that have the wild feel of ghazals, this book is full of lyric revelations where '.
. . any corner of the universe has its branch office on earth.' The Recumbent Galaxy is one of those branch offices."
--John Minczeski, author of A Letter to Serafin
"The collaboration of Alvaro Cardona-Hine & George Kalamaras sweeps us into a world where the poets either shatter or dissolve conventional assumptions & artificial boundaries. medium;">The Recumbent Galaxy takes us on a wild ride that is by turns stunning, hilarious, disturbing, & ecstatic."
--John Tritica, author of Sound Remains
ISBN 10: 0-9815010-7-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-9815010-7-9
Binding: Tradepaper
Size: 6x9
144 pages
Pub Date: January 2010
Price: US $19.95