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.

'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.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

Desire can make anything into a god.

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

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us