![]() The enemy.” In Zamora’s incantation, these lines are addressed not to Midway through the book, he quotes Dalton in Spanish at theĮnd, he translates the same passage into English: “My country, you don’tĮxist / You’re only a bad silhouette of mine / a word I believed from “Unaccompanied” is structured around a refrain from one of Zamora’sįavorite poets, the late Salvadoran writer and revolutionary Roqueĭalton. Shoulders / and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns,” he Saved his life on the final leg of his journey. Titled “Second Attempt at Crossing,” he recalls a long-gone stranger who The time, and so Zamora imagines them for himself. Signed “Dad, age 19.” Those “sentences” of forewarning went unsaid at Sentences in my sleep, / I didn’t sleep,” Zamora writes in one poem, “To tell you I was leaving / I waited and waited / rethinking first Perspective of Zamora’s parents in order to describe their coming ofĪge-and their tortured decision to leave for the United States without Grandfather’s subsequent rages (“We’re all running / from the sun on his Violence of the war years was refracted through memories of his Survived the country’s civil war at great personal cost for Zamora, the He addresses his grandparents, in El Salvador, who Recalls his life as though he is in conversation with the people who The poems are written in a searching, confessional style, in which their author Published a chapbook called “Nueve Años Inmigrantes,” and his firstįull-length volume, “ Unaccompanied,” has just come out. Zamora is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow, at Stanford. Nearly two decades later, Zamora finally remembered how the He grabbed the side of the boat and nearlyĬapsized it. ![]() Passenger jumped overboard to shit in the water, then panicked when he Realization that he didn’t know how to swim. Smell of gasoline,” he told me, which coincided with the blaring Guatemalan coast to a remote beach in Oaxaca, there had been a “huge These poems came to him in short, uncontrollable bursts they were Not been able to write that part in prose. “The memories got more sparse at that point,” he said. ![]() Guatemala his grandfather had turned back, and Zamora had proceeded on Grandfather, returned to him more easily. The beginning of his trip, which Zamora made with his Took twenty-five thousand words to reconstruct the first two hundred andįifty miles. Wrote down what he could remember-in prose, at first, the better to keep My house with my grandpa, got on a bus in San Salvador, and took theĮight-hour trip to the Guatemala-Mexico border,” he told me recently. “I just started, day by day, trying to remember that moment when I left at New York University, Zamora decided to retrace Over time, the details of his journey have blurred in his memory.Ī few years ago, after getting an undergraduate degree from Berkeley andīeginning an M.F.A. Now twenty-seven, he has lived in the U.S. Travelled alone to the United States, crossing the border on foot to When the Salvadoran-born poet Javier Zamora was nine years old, he Photograph by Ana Ruth Zamora / Blue Flower Arts Memories of the trek have come back to him as poetry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |