Angela Peñaredondo

Angela Peñaredondo (Poetry) | Riverside & Los Angeles, CA

Booking Fee:

Negotiable

Will Travel:

Anywhere

Contact:

ajpenaredondo_at_gmail.com

Website:

http://www.apenaredondo.com

Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx/Pin@y poet and artist. Her book, All Things Lose Thousands of Times won the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. She is also author of the chapbook, Maroon (Jamii Publishing). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AAWW’s The Margins, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dusie and elsewhere. Angela resides in Southern California, splitting her time between Los Angeles and Riverside, drifting between deserts, beaches, lowly cities and socially engineered suburbs.

Books

All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, 2016). Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Poetry.

Chapbooks

  • Maroon (Jamii Publishing, 2016). Poetry.

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

Total magnificence. Multi-sensory voyager – sculptor of love and painter of concept and delirium, a choreographer of space and a duende-splicer between Baudelaire, Lorca and Strauss. Angela is somewhere in there, cinematic; a Casanova pin-stripe suit, then a flaring thigh, then a topaz sari. I find Peñaredondo a most accomplished poet, a devouring mind and most of all, a deep, intimate observer touching the big bright, dark worlds — their wounds and miracles. She says,” I want to be that kind / who walks through a wall of fifty lives.” Indeed she possesses this kind of power. A genius at work.
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Angela Peñaredondo’s powerful debut, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, is a luminous and timely book of migratory poetics that gathers in the body, no matter how impossibly marooned, the mouth of the lyric I. Drawn from the compression of loss, “…beyond the clenched doors, the perfume/ of starved flowers.” Peñaredondo’s speaker seeks in the “…web of wetness, what…has been written out.” The poet’s collapsing of cultural dimensions into the weight of traveling through an embodied history and present reveals an urgent landscape (of war, of art, of nature, of people) of the inevitable and the incommensurable: “I’d rather be whoever bathes/in the monsoon, knees swaying—/unequaled. Wanting allows gospel…” Peñaredondo’s truth brilliantly explores precariousness, revealing the need to move at its edges, and to escape, into “husk” and “crystalline pictograph”—“I came back not to regret/ or ask the particulars why I left./ When a tree falls, its roots/ aim jagged, pointing/ in all directions…”
—Ronaldo Wilson, Author of Farther Traveler

The poems in All Things Lose Thousands of Times aptly tell a transnational coming of age story, a becoming from the savage and the fertile, the urban and the fantastic, where “heaven comes after collision.” This is a stunning debut for Penaredondo, poems that shimmer with dense and riveting lyricism.
—Carmen Giménez Smith, Author of Milk and Filth

Elastic, dimensional, all-together convincing, Angela Peñaredondo’s debut All Things Lose Thousands of Times wields the language as a mountain wields a storm, in phrases that pivot, reverse, wander, tighten, leap and fall through geographies of the body, an inward archipelago of experience, individual and collective, all past and flooded, all future and on fire, bearing unflinching witness to courage, revelation and sexuality, to life and to the lives of women where “their mothers have turned into mangroves” and where “her father found us / as I knelt before her, knees / on church-cold tile.” A profoundly alert and loving book that sings and celebrates the cosmic interplay of forms. This is what poetry can do. I feel rescued by it.
—Chad Sweeney, Author of Wolf’s Milk

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