The University of Arizona Press
When: Thursday, March 21, 2024
Time: 9 a.m., EDT
Where: Lancaster East 203, Harrisburg Area Community College, Lancaster, PA and on Zoom
Margarita Pintado Burgos will read from her book, Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat as part of the Wildwood Writers’ Festival at Harrisburg Area Community College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Festival is free and open to the public, with writers reading from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., EDT, in person and on Zoom. Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat is the 2023 winner of the Ambroggio Prize of the of the Academy of American Poets.
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.
