Breathing in Minneapolis by Patrick Cabello Hansel

Living near an epicenter of the tumultuous events of 2020 — COVID, the murder of George Floyd, civil unrest, and the often murderous cruelty of American society — Patrick Cabello Hansel turns out to be the perfect chronicler of that year.  The poems in Breathing In Minneapolis  miraculously keep their lyricism while maintaining fidelity to fact.  Hansel writes with extraordinary spiritual sensitivity of a multitude of different lives in a way Whitman would have envied.  One poem asks, “How far are we from heaven?” and the answer given by the book may surprise readers:  Not far, when such rich, deep compassion is brought to bear on our breathlessly desperate moment of truth.

–Thomas R. Smith, author of Storm Island and Medicine Year

These poems are of hiding, of being torn open, of meditating, of mourning, of marching, of anger, and ultimately of reverent adoration. True to the calling of his holy office, Patrick walks in deep alliance with neighbors nesting in shadows. He anoints us all to live into the breath of deep prayers rising for justice, for love, here in the epicenter of South Minneapolis.

–Sandy Spieler, artist, former Artistic Director of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre

Patrick Cabello Hansel’s Breathing in Minneapolis reveals a poet thoroughly engaged with people in crises. Hansel is a man of the world and the word, the ordinary and the apocalyptic. “It’s Lilac Time / and the Family Dollar is on fire” begins a poem paying attention to both poetic pattern and moral outrage. With a poet’s ear and a minister’s heart, Hansel writes from inside our “star spangled garage sale,” negotiating the breathless space between lilacs and guns, rendering  moments of crises against enduring liturgical patterns. These richly elegiac poems call us to breathe in a world not entirely broken, and despite “the smoke on our fingers,” to notice that birds might still sing “cornstalk and sweet berry.”

–Joyce Sutphen, Carrying Water to the Fields, and Walter Cannon, The Possible World.