The University of Arizona Press
March 12, 2025
Presented in Spanish with English translations, Octavio Quintanilla’s collection Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing.
Today, Quintanilla answers five questions about his work.
I understand you started writing these poems in 2018 while you were San Antonio’s poet laureate. How, if at all, did serving as laureate shape this book?
Yes, I did. This is the time when I was seeing stories on social media of people being verbally or physically attacked for speaking Spanish in public. This really pissed me off. I am sure it happens all the time, but somehow this time it felt different, more personal. Although I have had a practice of writing in Spanish for years, after these events, and after realizing that I had a public platform as San Antonio’s Poet Laureate, I decided to start sharing my visual poems, which I call Frontextos, on social media. All of the work I shared contained text written in Spanish, which was my way to call attention to the fact that, for some of us, Spanish is our first language, and any sort of violence for speaking it, or writing it, was not going to stop us from doing so. This Frontexto project led me to write longer poems, more lyrical, more narrative, which is what you find in Las Horas Imposibles.
This collection includes concrete poems, which combine visual art with text, and you’re known for your “Frontextos,” which also combine language and graphic elements. Can you talk about what draws you to these hybrid forms of poetry?
I have always been interested in painting and in the challenge visual art poses for me as a viewer, as a reader. It is pleasurable for me to look at a visual poem, for instance, and not be sure of how it wants me to read it, or of where it wants to take me. Being at a loss for direction. It’s exciting for me. To not know, and yet, to apply what I know to try to figure it out. To see what is buried underneath layers of text or images, to look at contours, to see the action on the page and try to figure out how the visual poet/artist is manipulating material to get it the way it is. To arrive at some sort of meaning. I think this interest in hybrid forms originated as a teenager when I started painting, so I have always been interested in how a visual poem can disrupt how I read, and how it disrupts how I see what’s on the page.
One of your concrete poems, “Los Canallas y Asesinos,” looks a bit like an asterisk, with radial lines of text emerging from a center point. The English translation reads: “Thugs and murderers also kiss their children | kiss their mother’s foreheads.” The “Thugs and murderers” here feels like an act of naming, a designation that echoes the dehumanizing political rhetoric we hear constantly about immigrants. It seems like you’re asking us to pay attention to the way we name people, and to shift our perspective. Is this accurate?
The way you explicate this text is one way to read it. But I am sure there are other ways into the text. Here I am thinking of how I answered the previous question, about the pleasure that exists when looking at a thing, a visual poem, to be more exact. I included this visual poem in the book because I find it beautiful. I love looking at it. I suspect some readers will come at it this way—looking at it first, hopefully experiencing some sort of visual pleasure before reading the text itself. Then, of course, the text, paired with the visual image, takes on a deeper, darker meaning when considered within the context of the surrounding poems.
Speaking of form, the second section of your book is written as a single long poem, which is notoriously demanding. What was your process for writing this poem? Did it emerge all at once, or in fragments?
I wrote this poem during the Pandemic. Stuck at home, I bought a bunch of notebooks, one of them being a soft cover, 5.5”x8.25” moleskin. This is where I wrote it. Every day I handwrote one page. Forty in total. Filled the whole notebook. This is why the poem looks the way it does in the book. How the sections are divided by a line. So, I think it’s safe to say it emerged in fragments. The challenge was keeping the momentum of the poem going. Of course, the final version in the book went through heavy revision.
What are you working on next?
I am working on a few projects. Essays on poetics, borderlands, and masculinity. Ongoing Frontextos. And a novel. Let’s see how that goes.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.
