Message from the editors
Within this issue is a handwoven masterpiece of intermingled threads representing work that crosses borders of all kinds. The artist and poets here shown present work that is truly transcultural, embracing the beauty within all of their respective experiences and subsequently twining them together into what is priceless.
Alexandra Cespedes’s Man and His Violin thrums with painted vibration through body.Her man seems possessed, enthralled, circled by a passionate music, a need to play that fulfills. Perhaps this is what drew us to consider it as the unifying piece for the poems presented within this inaugural issue.
Ray Gonzalez honors The Acentos Review with, among other pieces, a poem written after Federico Garcia Lorca and Victor Hernandez Cruz, called “My city is full of insects”. Allow yourself the privilege of following his transfiguring poetics into the conceptualization of a new world.
Rachel McKibbens follows him with a poem that locates itself in place while capturing a sadness, a loss of innocence, a crossroads all within childhood recollection.
Within this issue, Sheila Maldonado seduces us using the voices of beloved singers and images of the barren and the blossoming.
With Christina Olivares, voices, too, circle, invade, and beg to be released and they are through these intensely rich poems, as powerful in their content as in form.
Jose Olivarez pulls the reader from suburbia into the hood with a detached, ironic regard that shifts one to contemplate the poem and return again and again for further understanding.
Mundo Rivera challenges a return to his work in content and form as well conjuring a Biblical king.
Finally, Griselda Suarez hearkens back to tradition through her odes to home and family.
These artists inspired us and pushed us through their willingness to risk. May we all be so brave.
Editors of The Acentos Review