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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

• 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 Pixellated 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 uncharted adventures to fall in love, to proclaim a love, to lick our wounds over its inevitable disgraces, or to try again to feel.

  _____________
  Yvette Benavides is a professor of English at Our Lady of the Lake University.

• Love poems to the world and to the word

  Southwestern American LiteratureSpring 2012

  Reviewed by Octavio Quintanilla

  "How do I love thee?" Elizabeth Browning begins her famous "Sonnet 43." More than one hundred years later, Lorna Dee Cervantes reminds us that Browning's question is still relevant, and it invites an answer:

  I love how you shelter
  me, the warmth within your
  hearth, all that wood you
  had stored. I love all
  that wilderness in the heart
  of you, all that uncut
  lumber just waiting for my
  touch.
         ("100 Words for Your Shelter")

  In Lorna Dee Cervantes's latest poetry collection, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, all the poems are composed of one hundred words, words that, as the Spanish title suggests, should make you feel a burst of emotion.

  Overall, the poems are playful and spontaneous, each offering insight into the complexities of love. In an interview published in World Literature Today, Cervantes points out that because she was not in love at the time of writing Ciento, she felt she was writing "love poems for strangers." Maybe this is why, in these one hundred poems, she refuses to take herself too seriously. A good thing. The rationale for her playfulness can be found in her collection, Drive: The First Quartet, in which she includes an introductory note to the section, "Play." She writes, "I call these my '7 Minute Poems.' All are unrevised except for punctuation. All are spontaneous, with given titles. They are centered spokes on the wheel, as they remain." This explanation, with its emphasis on spontaneity, applies to the poems in Ciento; these poems contrast in tone and approach from poems found in earlier collections that are often rooted in politics and autobiography: "We were so poor. / The air was a quiver of thoughts..." ("To My Brother" from Emplumada); "I know all about us exotics / in the hot house of your dreams" ("Litost" from From The Cables of Genocide). In Ciento, Cervantes broadens her poetic range and strengthens her sense of discipline by limiting herself to one hundred words, and she reminds us that, above all, love is a possibility.

  If love is the energy of the universe, as philosophers, astrophysicists, and poet Olga Nolla claim, then love must also be possibility. In the poem, "100 Words Towards Possibility," Cervantes tells us:

  Love is the possibility of doubting,
  the possibility of making a mistake,
  the possibility of searching and experimenting,
  the possibility of saying no and whispering yes.
  

  This is the language of Cervantes: clear, direct, a language that catalogues but often transcends mere listing. With imagery, she returns to basics: earth, air, fire, water. These elements appear throughout the collection, making the poems "elemental," as Linda Hogan calls them in her blurb.

  One of Cervantes's favorite elements is water, and she uses the sea as a metaphor for unrestrained desire. We don't have to go back that far in time to see how other poets have used the sea as a metaphor in this regard. After Dickinson had her "wild, wild nights," she longed for safety and wished to be moored in the sea's Eden. Years later, the Cuban poet, Dulce María Loynaz described the passion for her beloved in sea metaphors: "And with the sea in / my arms and an open horizon, I will perish in you" ("Sea Surrounded"). Similarly, Cervantes wants to know her beloved's "enormous sea" ("100 Words & 9 Haiku into the Distraction of You"), an image that connotes sex and a lover's awakening to physical desire. References to water appear often, water being the element through which the desire of the lover and the beloved is released: "All we are is water," Cervantes writes in the poem, "100 Words to Stimulate You."

  Because the book is divided into five sections, and because the sections lack specific thematic structures, recurring tropes hold the poems together. In addition to water and fire, Cervantes references blogs, Twitter, and Google. In a world run by technology, here is the new language of love: "I want your fingers / on my mousepad, Baby, your / palm between my pages" ("100 Words to Google"). The humor continues in the poem, "100 Words On My Blogging You":

  I want to blog you,
  log-in to you, upload your
  downloads,
  test out your hardrive.
  

  Though on the internet she blogs her love, on the page Cervantes nods not only to Pablo Neruda, but to Federico García Lorca, riffing on his "Romance sonámbulo," which begins with the lines, "Green, how I love you green. / Green wind. Green boughs." Here's Cervantes's take: "Blood that I love you. / Blood that I take you." As I read this poem, I couldn't help but imagine how much better it would sound in Spanish, as Lorca's poems always do in the original: "Sangre que te quiero. / Sangre que te llevo." A Spanish word here and there adds flavor to some poems. The reader who is not bilingual will have no trouble with the Spanish words, for most, if not at all, are commonplace: amigo, carnál, corazón. In the poem, "100 Words after the Family of You," for instance, Cervantes moves smoothly from English to Spanish, "suavecito," reminding us that every "death takes us further from / ourselves." At the heart of a love poem is loss, the potential for it, the "music without the / chair," the "plate missing the meal," the half-empty lives we live if we don't have the courage to risk and lose. In the end, even grief is a love song.

  The titles indicate what the poems will be about: possibility, spirit, secrets, miscommunication, restraint, respect. Big ideas considered in 100 words. Most lines are composed of five words, making it easy to ensure that the poems have 100 words as promised. The only downside in measuring a poetic line with the five-word count is that sometimes too many lines end in uninteresting uses of articles, pronouns, and prepositions. The early work of Lorna Dee Cervantes has been called "confident" by critics and has been recommended for general collections and for those that feature "Latino, Chicano, and Native American poets." I venture to call the poems in Ciento playful exercises in spontaneity. Exercises in improvisation. List poems that succeed in their unassuming insight and light-heartedness. In the poem, "100 Words Thankful for You," Cervantes writes, "I'm thankful for my / life of getting to know / your life." With these poems, we get to know a little bit more about Cervantes's poetic sensibility, her poetic approach, and her understanding of love and desire. This is a book you want to carry under your arm, open to a random page, and find a short gem to remind you that love is still worth writing about—that ultimately, all poems are love poems to the world and to the word.

  ________
  Reviewed by Octavio Quintanilla, Texas A&M University-Kingsville