The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, April 6, 2024
Time: 12:45 p.m.- 3:15 p.m., PDT
Where: Coronado Public Library, Multi-Purpose Room, Bldg. 400, 640 Orange Ave., Coronado, CA
Margarita Pintado Burgos will read from her book, Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat as part of the San Diego Writers Festival at the Coronado Public Library. This event is hosted by the San Diego Poetry Annual and is free and open to the public. Pintado will read alongside other featured SDPA authors including Kazim Ali, Carly DeMento, Reg E. Gaines, Katie Manning, Lenora Simonovis, and Ted Washington. Guests are also encouraged to bring poems to share at the event.
About the book:
Aflame with desire, the eye conjures, dreams, invents itself, sees what it wants. The eye sees what it is able to see.
Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat brings into sharp relief the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language.
With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos’s poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house’s furniture. Light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish. Alejandra Quintana Arocho’s sensitive English translation renders the stark force of these poems without smoothing over the language of the original.
