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9781961897380

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""An image has no need to narrate,"" writes Daniel Ruiz. ""It lives in your eye."" Life is full of cause and effect, but art needn't be. Quietly, and cleverly, Ruiz subverts the authority usually ascribed to authorial voice, preferring instead ""the sensation that language, set down on a page, actually furiously moves omnidirectionally."" What is pervasive and persuasive in these poems is the music, the joy in odd words, the veering of imagination into other lanes, other lines, other lives. Shape-shifting, shadows, illusions. So real because none of this is real and yet it all is. Each road leading to other roads. --DA Powell In Reality Checkmate, Daniel Ruiz tackles reality itself, nimbly assembling and reassembling what we think we know in order to move us toward a greater, more profound feeling. His end game is elegant and swift, and when Reality tips over its king in defeat, it's Life that comes out the winner, which includes us, too. --Tomás Q. Morín Reading Ruiz's poems feels like discovering a new word for ""imagination,"" while realizing that the rigid structures of our reality are being subverted and destabilized. His electric language and masterful syntax are charged with the spontaneity and precision of a gymnast somersaulting on psychedelics--each pyrotechnic, acrobatic, and ecstatic movement dismantles the old and reconstructs reality with a fresh, metaphysical vision. Readers are drawn into this process, compelled to help engineer a new world, as Ruiz writes, ""when the best virtual / reality helmet there is / is a blindfold."" To read Ruiz is to embody ""imagination"" itself. --Shangyang Fang These debut poems on mortality, identity, and meaning get a thorough and volatile surrealist spin by Daniel Ruiz. Sly, funny, and extravagant, Reality Checkmate evokes life not as it was or is, but how it could be, drenched in paradox and candor. Ruiz's exciting associations and musical turns have a humanity that grins back at us as we read. Sailors, supermarkets, movies, and other ""remnants of empire,"" as he puts it, get a fresh coat of enchantment. As Daniel Ruiz writes, ""There are no kings, only magicians of the singular..."" --Jane Miller

Author Information

Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican and Cuban poet and translator, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and Florida State University, and a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series. In 2016, he was a Fulbright Scholar to Chile. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where he edits poetry and translations for the Denver Quarterly.

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