Synopses & Reviews
These quiet, descriptive poems blaze with an inferno of lamenting and loving muses as a son helplessly watches his father suffer from a debilitating illness. The inquisitive voice of the speaker gently paints an emotional landscape ranging from childhood to the present, while trying to find glimpses of happiness in the imminent sorrow.
Review
“This brilliant book tells a hell-forged truth with angelic music, making devastating beauty from the elemental and agonized relation between father and son—at once a war and a loss and a tether, a home. Through the cruel truth there is love; even in the deepest pit there’s light. This nocturnal-hearted poet’s not likely looking for it but there it is, still falling all over his burning, metallic, ruinous discoveries. There it is: love and brutality mixed together in epic scenes. No judgment, no transcendence—no way out of the mire. Cerpa’s is a magnificent talent—a yawp made for this very moment, and a voice for the ages.” Brenda Shaughnessy
Review
"To read [Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy] is to step into Cerpa’s mind — to enter a ransacked world, bleak yet beautiful." The Harvard Crimson
Review
"With fierce despair and wisdom hard won through pain...these experiences have sharpened Cerpa’s stunning, dark observations and sparked chilling lines.” Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Andrés Cerpa was raised in Staten Island, New York and spent many of his childhood summers in Puerto Rico. A recipient of fellowships from the McDowell Colony and Canto Mundo, his work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-A-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, West Branch, Foundry Journal, Wildness + elsewhere. He holds degrees from the University of Delaware and Rutgers University Newark.