Synopses & Reviews
Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself — great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.
Review
“No matter what his subject, Corral is a gifted storyteller, precise and dizzying with his imagery.” The Millions
Review
“Devastating and electrifying....Shot through with the dark realities of human tragedy, Corral’s latest is a virtuosic compendium of grief." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
“Corral nimbly bridges the personal and political, evoking themes of migration to ask what it means to be unwanted.” New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy
About the Author
Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He was a founding fellow of the CantoMundo Writers Conference, and recipient of a Whiting Award. He teaches at North Carolina State University.