Overview

In Like Bismuth When I Enter, Carlos Lara engages language in the purely creative aspect of language--it's synthesis of dream and waking world. In these vibrant, hallucinatory poems, inspired by the element Bismuth and its iridescent surrealist structure, Lara attempts to produce a collective surge of new imagery, a new mind state, and structural undoing. Like Bismuth When I Enter captures that moment when the universe strikes you with an unmistakable reminder of mystery via the quotidian or the elemental.

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9781643620190

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Reviews

Carlos Lara's Like Bismuth When I Enter enters the space of ritual, incantation and trance with a stunning assemblage of images and structures. No line forgets itself because each announces itself past traditional language structures and usages so urgently that one is compelled to pay the most focused attention. One often cites a book's excellence by saying it bears or invites or rewards rereading and in this case each of these different verbal approaches is true-and the text reads you right back. While reading this book I found myself needing to recite, to truly experience the shifts in perception that accompanied such a bold and surprising abandonment of the familiar. Phrases, sentences, lines, and fragments scintillate and spark with multiple realities. Lara has risked a great deal to transcend sense and form as we understand it to make a remarkably fresh and majestic book. I feel returned to the primordial, the preclassical, the prelingual. I feel like I am hearing for the first time. Stein wanted to make words new; Lara has picked up the mission and carried it far. --Kazim Ali, judge's Citation for Nightboat Books Poetry Prize Carlos Lara's Like Bismuth When I Enter consists of language that transmutes itself as a quantum hawk flying through non-sequential fractures of existence. His lingual exploration teems with the uncanny as it explores random planes such as a 'numb Serengeti of drool,' all the while 'approving of love and life.' Via tangential subversion Lara's language expresses the genuine pedigree of the poetic act. --Will Alexander

Carlos Lara's Like Bismuth When I Enter consists of language that transmutes itself as a quantum hawk flying through non-sequential fractures of existence. His lingual exploration teems with the uncanny as it explores random planes such as a 'numb Serengeti of drool,' all the while 'approving of love and life.' Via tangential subversion Lara's language expresses the genuine pedigree of the poetic act. -Will Alexander Some poets think beauty is truth; others think truth-bare, odd, arbitrary, unrestrained-is beautiful. Carlos Lara falls in with the latter. Poems of such poets are often called 'difficult.' But what if difficulty wrote its own book of poems, about what you think of it and how that makes it feel? Well, Lara read that book and then wrote this one, answering difficulty's prayer for itself: Show me to be 'real life true freedom,' 'not explained yet that is also beauty.' -Jessica Laser Phrases, sentences, lines, and fragments scintillate and spark with multiple realities. Lara has risked a great deal to transcend sense and form as we understand it to make a remarkably fresh and majestic book. I feel returned to the primordial, the preclassical, the prelingual. Stein wanted to make words new; Lara has picked up the mission and carried it far. Kazim Ali, judge's Citation for Nightboat Books Poetry Prize

Author Information

Carlos Lara is the author of The Green Record and co-author of The Audiographic As Data. The poem ""God Wave"" was published as a chapbook in 2018. Other poems and translations have appeared in Lana Turner, Seedings, Vestiges, Aurochs, Flag + Void, Gulf Coast, Omniverse, and elsewhere. He abides in Los Angeles.

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