Altar of the Imagination by Marisa Urrutia Gedney

Poet Marisa Urrutia Gedney wants her readers to know: “If you can sing in other worlds I want to hear you.” The song of Altar of the Imagination soars despite fires, addiction, and distance from our own hearts. This canto is bridging dimensions, a literal ladder to the moon. The heart of this Altar is a bird–sometimes on a chain-link fence, along busy freeways, and train tracks. But it never stops being a song of hope, that tiny thing with feathers. Urrutia Gedney‘s relatives fly and sing despite the multiple poisons of city life, of capitalism, of racism. But with love and the song of these poems, we see parents and children building fences against brutal winds. We are all safer knowing that this book’s grandmother keeps a close eye on her loved ones from the moon, where so many of our relatives reside. This book is not afraid to look into the fire and see what is left, what is felt, once it all burns down to ash. This book will “sew, print, press into you,” demanding: “What do you want to [change] with each tilling of the soil?”

 —Vickie Vértiz, author of Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut

The things we are afraid to speak out loud, to let ourselves imagine–about love, about loss, about our own flaws and those of the people we love most–Urrutia Gedney positions in clear view, in celebration and in mourning, on her altar of the imagination. 

Urrutia Gedney sets her words against a pink-hued, golden state backdrop, the mountains and the beaches framing questions of identity and migration. Like the tides or moon phases of her imagery, a rhythm of breathing in and out, of the complexity and duality of it all, runs through her collection, a reminder that “a life breathes if you’ve felt light as joyfully as the dark.”

 —Emilie Coulson, poet and co-playwright of Victory Farm

There are flames in here, from gentle embers to uncontrolled wildfires—and also respect for that fire. A poetry collection is an altar of the imagination, and Marisa Urrutia Gedney‘s work is its prayer smoke carrying us. Among the gray fingers of freeways live family gardens and the breath of resilience—”the wind has never left the sky” … This is how we continue to fill our places with living.

—Kenji C. Liu, author of Monsters I Have Been