Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems
by Lorna Dee Cervantes
978-0-916727-84-0 || Cost: $16.00
Paperback , 128 pages
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ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-153-5
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-154-2
Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-155-9
Lorna Dee Cervantes' first collection since the celebrated DRIVE: The First Quartet. Publication of
Ciento has been delayed until September 2011.
Poems No. 23 and No. 31:
100 Words To A Pixellated & Pixilated You
If 100 words is all
it takes to write me
back to you, I say,
bring on the fractures, new
fissures, the tiny breaks in
the heart, all the on
and off in the mathematics
of we two--wee bits
of light catching the fold.
I say, say it simple,
keep it close to chest.
One switch puts it all
in play--this television drama
splicing us together or apart.
I say, this spring season
watch all the episodes with
me. Dance across the screen.
Let me knead you to
your final conclusion. Let's laugh,
a fractal imagining, and love.
100 Words For Neruda's Mercy
You show me no mercy,
have me wearing Pablos' cape,
going about the sorrow-sucked streets
singing to myself, searching locked
faces for calla lilies like
a dog with an egg
in her mouth. You want
roses? Nights in love with
the bloom in your hand?
Give me tough seeds, plants
that grow only in deserts,
trees that sprout through fire.
I want you, your expressed
desire, olive oil from your
sultry secrets, salty taste of
your memories, what doesn't live
tomorrow but in the eternal
today of your sudden loving
smile. You made me me.
You! Show me no mercy!
Critical Praise for Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems
- In this delightful book, Lorna Dee Cervantes has undertaken a mad discipline: the 100 word format unleashes paradoxically vast effects. Full of playfulness, rage and her traditional fire, Ciento is a masterful performance. (The title, said out loud, not only means "100," but can be read in another way to say: "I feel.") These are the world's biggest, deepest, miniatures. You will dip into it again and again.
— Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Queen of America
- Come down from your Tower of Loneliness and enter the hurly burly of Love in Lorna Dee Cervantes' magnificent book of poems, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems. Each poem is 100 words long. Each poem overflows with an abundance of poetic energy, insight, eroticism, and above all, humor. Someone once said you know when you've read a good poem because when the poem stops, you go through the windshield. In this collection, you go through the windshield at almost every line. As Lorna Dee says in her poem "100 Words to the Chaos (Without You)," whatever pattern of attraction she has for you, the reader, she longs to "lay it on a Fibonacci /sequential spiral dance to you." Buy this book. Read it. It'll keep you young and in love forever.
— E. A. "Tony" Mares, author of With the Eyes of a Raptor and Astonishing Light: Conversations I Never Had With Patrociño Barela
- A hundred love poems. They might be called elemental, taking in earth, air, water, fire. But there is humor here, the large and small joys and grievances of love. What could be more enticing than a combination of prayers with blogs, the ancient with the contemporary, an entire range of reverent, irreverent love, all glimmering together like a century of chance?
— Linda Hogan, author of People of the Whale and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
Reviews
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Poetry brings words of love, feelings, by the numbers
San Antonio Express-NewsSept. 11, 2011
Special to the [San Antonio Express-News]
Reviewed by Yvette Benavides
Love poems. Enough to make us swear off poetry forever? Maybe, but only when they're schmaltzy — the last word anyone would ever use about the latest collection from San Antonio's Wings Press by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems.
Cervantes, who reads from the new collection Friday at Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, blazed trails in the 1970s when she was an active member of the new Chicano Movement. In her work, she speaks to the conundrums of alienation and identity.
Ciento, however, is all love. Indeed, in these 100 love poems she gives voice to the myriad ways in which we feel when we love. The poems are playful, funny, sexy, desperate, hopeless and buoyant.
The book is divided into five sections of 20 poems each, and, yes, there are 100 of them each made up of 100 words that get at the heart of love's mysteries and promises.
The image on the front cover of this book is a photograph of the skeletal remains of a man and woman facing each other as if buried in mid-embrace. They are in fact, remains from 4,500 BC found near Mantua, Italy.
Here begins the timeless, universal journey on the roller coaster of love's triumphs and travails with Cervantes as our perceptive and exuberant guide. One would have to be as dead as the skeletons on the cover of the book not to feel moved by Cervantes' energy and eloquence.
Here are a handful of words from the collection, from Possibilities — In 100 Words : A murder of crows on my/elm tree became you finally calling my number, a slumber/of vultures circling my apartment, a single red fox roaming/my neighborhood.
There's something reminiscent of Cervantes' hero, Pablo Neruda, in this collection, something subtly tragic in perceiving love as something so sacred because it is ephemeral, temperamental, deceitful, elusive. In 100 Words for You at Last, she writes, At last. Love has come/at last. Last time love/came all it was was a quest....
100. That's a good round number for love, connoting completion, fullness, perfection for something that can be mostly incomplete, unrequited, and imperfect. Cervantes plays delightfully with the formula and format of 100 words in each poem. In 100 Words to a Pixilated and Pixilated You she writes If 100 words is all it takes to write me back to you, I say, bring on the fractures, new fissures, the tiny breaks in the heart....
100 words, 100 times in the interest of cracking love's inscrutable code. That's about right. Each poem is a new chance, a new escape or risk into unchartered adventures to fall in love, to proclaim a love, to lick our wounds over its inevitable disgraces, or to try again to feel.
Lorna Dee Cervantes reads from Ciento at 7 p.m. Friday at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, 922 San Pedro.
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Yvette Benavides is a professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University.
About This Author
Read more about Lorna Dee Cervantes HERE.
