Poised for Flight by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

$19.99

 

The poems in Rosie Prohías Driscoll‘s debut collection are stepping stones through the liminal spaces which marry the past and present: dual heritages, bilingual explorations into the ways we carry our ancestors in language, memory, and faith. Through a language of her own belonging and with skillfully crafted images and metaphors, Prohías Driscoll fathoms the power of transience and inheritance, all of us pajaritos in flight.

–Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

 

The poems in Poised for Flight take readers on an intergenerational family journey full of yearning, adventure, and intimacy. In this memoir-in-verse, Rosie Prohías Driscoll traverses her family’s past, present, and imagined futures from Cuba to the United States and back. “Cuéntame // Mami, tell me a story / count me,” she writes, exposing a fundamental truth — that storytelling is a form of taking stock, of asserting who and what counts. Throughout the collection Prohías Driscoll grounds readers with visceral, embodied details and releases them into the airy world of words at play. Her poems, like her children, “live beyond / the plots we have prepared for them.” And while it may be true that “En Cuba no hay papel / ni pá los médicos escribir recetas,” Prohías Driscoll teaches us it’s not in the sheets of paper, but in the stories themselves — told and retold across the generations — that we come to appreciate what counts most.

–Li Yun Alvarado, author of Words or Water

 

In Poised for Flight, Rosie Prohías Driscoll beautifully braids cultures, languages, and generations – poem by poem, stanza by stanza, line by line. Through her memories, you’ll experience the subtleties of love and loss. Through her stories, you’ll understand the intricacies of joy and heartache. This debut collection brims with heart and history; faith and strength. It will leave readers asking the author for more please/¡más, por favor!

–Dawn Leas, author of A Person Worth Knowing, Take Something When You Go, and I Know When to Keep Quiet

 

 

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Description

Poised for Flight

by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-64662-833-9

2022

From an early age, Rosie Prohías Driscoll was enthralled by the family stories recounted by her mother, grandmother, and great aunts about their lives in Cuba before the family was exiled to the United States. At the same time, she felt a void left by the premature death of her father and the lost connection to his family who stayed behind. In her debut poetry collection, Poised for Flight, Prohías Driscoll excavates these family roots to uncover a poignant story of loss and resurrection spanning five generations. In the telling, she cultivates trees and intertwines branches where her children – and the readers of her poems – can find shelter and firm footing for flight.

 

Rosie Prohías Driscoll is a Cuban-American educator and poet. The daughter and granddaughter of Cuban exiles, she was raised in Miami, Florida and writes about themes of identity and exile, loss and renewal, grief and grace. Her poems have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Acentos Review, Mas Tequila Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Literary Mama, Temenos Journal, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, SWWIM Every Day, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, and Gyroscope Review, and she was a finalist for the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize. She teaches high school English in Alexandria, Virginia, where she lives with her husband, greyhound, and a host of ancestral spirits who keep her rooted and grateful. When not teaching or writing, she relishes spending time with friends and family and researching her family tree. Poised for Flight is her first full-length collection.

 

 

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