dream of xibalba
PRAISE FOR DREAM OF XIBALBA
"Dream of Xibalba [...] is an epic poem that tests the boundaries of life and death, reality and the dream world, ancestors and spirits and ghosts." —HipLatina "A journey deep into ancestry and identity, the ties of blood and bone, Dream of Xibalba is rife with intricate and ancient symbolism. Adams-Santos deftly leads us on in mythic and transformational meditation on the ways in which we’re formed by both the ghosts of our past and the rich tapestry of our present moment." —Jessica Hundley "The poemspace is often a dreamspace, whether in Homer or the Popol Vuh, the dream-visions of medievals, the post-Freudian associations of automatic writing, or even the aspirationalism of liberatory poetries. In all of these, though, the dreamspace is too a deathspace, with an underworld, an afterlife. In Stephanie Adams-Santos's Dream of Xibalba, this wide breadth of dreamspace is acutely a deathspace, enabling a poetry as equally imaginative as material, mythic as personal. Alongside the one world of prosaic light and knowledge, it imagines 'another world of life and death,' 'another blood,' 'another memory nested / in memory.' Past the prosaic, horizontal certainties of waking life, Dream of Xibalba reaches—downward, upward—to 'names you’ve forgotten,' 'names you never knew.'" —Jos Charles "In this vivid book-length poetic sequence in 12 parts, Stephanie Adams-Santos investigates the fraught, elusive territory where memory and history intersect with presence, and landscape is haunted by dream and disappearance. Here is a world where a long-dead ancestor is 'forever burning in place,' a bird nips 'at its own shadow,' and 'There is nothing here / that will tell you who you are.'" —Laurie Sheck |
Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos' incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. The influence of such poets as Cecilia Vicuña, Federico García Lorca, and Yvan Goll is evident here, yet Adams-Santos's voice and vision are entirely her own. Dream of Xibalba is a unique, epic work of cultural and spiritual significance.
Selected by Jericho Brown as winner of the Orison Poetry Prize "Dream of Xibalba is a long and hypnotic meditation on rediscovery. Each page spirals out from the page before in a manner of breathless recognition: 'You open yourself / your mouth your eyes your forehead / with a sharp stone carried from childhood.' This is not a poetry of fearlessness but of the journey one takes in spite of fear. 'This is what you must listen for.'" —Jericho Brown, judge of The 2021 Orison Poetry Prize Orison Books paper / 132 pp. / $18.00 ISBN: 978-1-949039-38-2 Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books 952-223-8373 / [email protected] Publication Date: May 2, 2023 REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS:
"BECOMING MALLEABLE: A REVIEW OF DREAM OF XIBALBA" by José Angel Araguz
"On Rediscovery, Lost Ancestry, and the Poetics of Myth and Meditation" — an interview with Esteban Rodriguez
A review in-conversation with Laura Villareal and Alfredo Aguilar
La Treintena 2024: 30+ Books of Latinx Poetry — The Latinx Project, April 2024
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