It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.