Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry) | Norfolk, VA

Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK) , the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass  (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets  (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver  (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.

Books

Earlier Books

• Songs for the Beginning of the Millennium (De La Salle University Press 1997)
• Encanto (Anvil 1993)
• Blood Sacrifice (University of the Philippines Press 1997)
• In the Garden of the Three Islands (Moyer Bell/Asphodel 1995)
• Cartography (Anvil 1992)
• Cordillera Tales (New Day 1990)

Press & Reviews

“However often I watch them appear in my feed reader, Luisa’s poems are still an astonishment, virtuosic by-products of an intense daily (or nightly) grappling with language and memory that confounds the usual association between dailiness and ordinariness. Indeed, they are so rich, they must be savored slowly—often, I suspect, at less than half the speed at which they were originally composed. What a pleasure, then, to sit down at this feast of a collection, pulled together for our delectation by a master chef. Kain tayo!”
—Dave Bonta, editor of Via Negativa and MovingPoems.com

“When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—’as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place’—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe.”
—Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award

“Luisa A. Igloria establishes herself as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry. . . . Her engrossing poems hide, behind their gorgeous scrims, a bristling wall of spears.”
—Sabina Murray, author of Tales of the New World; A Carnivore’s Inquiry and The Caprices (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award)

“These are poems whose gaze is as public as it is personal, and whose desire is to bring us into conversation with others by reminding us of the instances in which our language, whether fragmented or fluid, makes us part of a larger river of voices, a chorus as old as humanity itself. Through Igloria’s poems we encounter the wisdom gleaned from looking backward and forward at once. Her ability to do so makes this collection, as well as her other work, an exercise in time travel well worth making.”
—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men, The Book of Women, and Facts about the Moon

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