Dinner at Las Heras
by Luciana Jazmín Coronado
Presale Available Now, Dinner at Las Heras will ship on or around November 15, 2024. Book cover image forthcoming.
C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl 2023 Chapbook Selection
ABOUT
Dinner at Las Heras is a bittersweet lovesong to a broken world, a geographical and psychological cartography spanning cityscapes and tangled internal terrain. The book is a reference to the first section of Luciana Jazmín Coronado’s Catacombs, winner of the Premio Hispanoamericano de la Poesía de San Salvador. In it, each section or “catacomb” is named for an address in Buenos Aires where the poet spent a fragment of her childhood. From Las Heras 3847 (where she lived with her father and stepmother), to Arengreen 1347 (her grandparents’ and mother’s home), to Calle Cero (or “Zero Street,” where she ends her first relationship and loses her little brother), Catacombs and Dinner at Las Heras are deeply personal explorations of past and present. With both real and metaphorical needle and thread, Coronado creates a tapestry from Las Heras that is dystopian yet optimistic, where children raise themselves and sprout from the rubble of adult disillusionment. Here, the dead are never dead, gardens speak, and ravenous flowers wait under the dinner table.
PRAISE FOR Dinner at Las Heras
“Timeless and visceral, sensuous and mysterious, the poems in Coronado’s Dinner at Las Heras seem to empty out of a universal dream of love and death. Family secrets haunt domestic scenes. Dark magic lingers around the garden. One can imagine Leonora Carrington painting such tales, unlocking the door to a hidden room, uncanny yet familiar.”
-Martin Corless-Smith, author of Nota and Bitter Green
“Dinner at Las Heras is a series of taxonomies, cataloging what is left to and for us by the ones we love when they go. These poems capture the physical: the dinner table, a wardrobe filled with nightgowns, the sensation of scissors severing an aloe leaf. It is these specific places and objects that allow Coronado to take the hand of the reader and lovingly guide us through a low-lit passageway into the remembered past.”
-Shilo Niziolek, author of Little Deaths, Pidgeon House, and atrophy
“We glimpse here the alchemist’s disappointment following an explosion: the metal— so precious and so similar— is only fool’s gold. In this book […] neither miracles nor miraculous acts of magic are not enough to turn things into different things, or people into other people. There is, however, a different type of sorcery at play, one where past and present intersect, and generations coexist, though imperfectly. The poems in Dinner at Las Heras plot a universe filled with surprises. They strive to evoke the past with a purpose even more presumptuous than that of alchemy: they seek to heal.”
-Facundo D’Onofrio
