Little Anodynes: Poems
Description
The third collection by the prize-winning Asian American poet Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes is a sequence of lyrical, personal narratives that continue Pineda's exploration of his biracial identity, the haunting loss of his sister, and the joys--and fears--of fatherhood. With its title inspired by Emily Dickinson, Little Anodynes offers its poems as "respites," as breaks in the reader's life that serve as opportunities for discovery and healing. Pineda deftly uses shortened lines and natural pauses to create momentum, which allows the poems to play out in a manner evocative of fine cinema, as if someone had left a projector running and these narratives were flickering and blending endlessly in an experience shared by the viewer, the storyteller, and the story itself.
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About the Author
Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, and Post Subject: A Fable. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry and co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board.
Reviews
"Pineda has used his considerable skill with language and its manipulation to capture, evoke, and unleash the condition of fatherhood, showing its emotional density as "a world no longer held / within language."�Literary Mama
�Jon Pineda�s Little Anodynes is a collection full of awe and great tenderness. Each prose poem presents a prismatic shard of memory, glancing across time from Pineda�s wrenching recollections of his father to fleeting moments with his own children, where he exposes them to the wondrous details of the natural world. Little Anodynes is a sensuous and poignant read, filled with lustrous fragmentary scenes of sense and memory. Absolutely captivating.��Cathy Park Hong, author of Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire
�It�s fitting that Jon Pineda�s sublime Little Anodynes alludes to Emily Dickinson in the title, as the poems in this collection manage the same exceptional balance of awareness and wonder that permeates Dickinson�s work. They are filled with the exquisite revelations of fatherhood, family, and the world pressing imminently, ominously, and achingly against them. Through Pineda�s compassion, vision, and gift for unexpected language, we share those tenuous intersections where, as the speaker in �Ellipses� says, we �finally see all / is buried underneath our / short lived joy.���Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke
�Poems of aching grace. . . . In Little Anodynes, Jon Pineda's resolute and lyrical language traverse the spectrum of human conditions and ease our lonely and troubled selves into the possibility of joy.�� Oliver de la Paz, author of Post Subject: A Fable, from the foreword
