Colaterales/Collateral

By Dinapiera Di Donato

"Di Donato is an ambitious, talented writer; her lush language will engage a wide and diverse audience."
--Library Journal; one of "Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014"

"Revelatory, a testament to Di Donato’s ability to deconstruct the complex weavings and machinations of the human heart."
--New York Journal of Books

"Dinapiera Di Donato's poetry exhibits a tremendous control of language...She is both ancient and contemporary . . . a vital poet who honors the memory of Octavio Paz."
--Victor Hernández Cruz, author of In the Shadow of Al-Andalus

These poems were written during days spent clearing river debris while the author was living along the Hudson River in Manhattan. The poems speak of these wanderings in the imaginary landscape of a nomadic subject who erases and rewrites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781617752032

Reviews for Colaterales/Collateral

[owen1218 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It was a chore and not a pleasure to read this collection of alienated urban poetry.

[tungsten_peerts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a vital, strong, even blistering sequence of poems. They are by no means easy, but the range of language on display here is nothing short of astonishing -- and I'm only talking about the English translation!I need to re-read the book: this is not the sort of work that one can breeze through once and then summarize. Once I make my way through again, I will come back and turn this into a proper review.Di Donato has a powerful voice, and I thank Akashic Press for introducing her to me. More to come.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some of the poems here--especially those in the first half of the work--are really lovely, floating on a mix of grace and clever wordplay that makes each poem both worthwhile and memorable. Many of the poems, though, are weighted down by heavy and regular allusions to historical and biblical characters and events. In these poems, it's often difficult to follow the train of the poem, and while the language is still lovely, the meaning sometimes gets lost. It is a lovely edition, with the Spanish text printed to face the English text on the opposite page, but the poetry itself feels unbalanced in many ways. I think I'll occasionally go back to a few of these poems, but I don't see myself feeling the need to reread (or recommend) the collection as a whole.

[yarb_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A set of unambitious PattiSmithlike poems which follow neatly in eachother's footsteps. They're divided into four sections, each with its own portentous title and lengthy epigraph, but there's not much difference between the sections. One of them seems to be marginally more concerned with the various mid-East conflicts and another with people wandering around galleries, but it's all much of a muchness.I quite like the way these poems handle cellphones, but in terms of style and subject there's nothing new here at all.A nice enough edition, bilingual, always to be welcomed, and the poems, being free of metre or rhyme, allow for a relatively straightforward translation. There are plenty of nice lines in this book, but nothing memorable or disquieting as good poetry ought to be.

[orangewords · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An ambitious collection, but a bit too hyper-referential for me to really get into it. There was a *lot* going on here, and I felt that it ultimately kept me from really engaging with the book as a whole. In addition, while I appreciated the nods to contemporary technology, I found constant references to cell phones and computers to be somehow… dated? Of the collection, my favorite poem was “An Attack on the Cardamom Cafe Before We Settle in Liverpool”. Clearly a well-written book, but it just didn’t grab me. As with most poetry, my opinion is definitely mine and mine alone, and others may enjoy this more than I did.

[tsoys · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading Venezuelan Dinapiera Di Donato’s prizewinning poetry book Collateral is no dip into the verse of slick and quick, but a door to poetic time travel, where distant pasts and modernity coexist, often from one line to the next. One could easily call the book’s four sections, realms: “One: Inside the Cavern; Two: The Rapture; Three: At Dormition’s Site;” and “Four: Message Networks (Aurea and the Voices).” Her poems’ spirituality collides with physical desire and passion, bloodletting and death, “As if a diamond stripped of rotten shell / could show life...” Ignoring today’s narrow temporal sense, painterly images taken from the early and mediaeval culture, myth, religious art, saints, dead languages, sacred sites, and harbingers of Catholicism, merge into the modern, cell phones, sex, satellites, and manga. A certain surreal shock results, as linear time folds back over itself by allusion to a holy name or a spiritual term engineered in juxtaposition to the now, a collateral effect moving backward and forward in time. She mines the violent but fertile cultural history of Christians, Arabs, and Jews. Culture in Collateral is made transcendent: an act, such as opening a door is recast as a past gesture recurring again in the present. Geography collapses. Meaning is multiplied, thought and visuals of various centuries meld together in a line of poetry. Past and present are not divorced by death, or distance, but exist as a universal, if sometimes dizzying instant, a...”turning off the news” in favor of a fuller sweep of the essential experience. This technique is brilliantly on exhibit in the first section titled “Inside the Cavern,” where the feeling is of a dark catacomb of existence, but one portrayed with great beauty. While the vocabulary of Catholicism may cause difficulty for some, reading a poem more once illuminates. Keep an internet device handy to help link any unfamiliar allusion to its textual significance. Di Donato’s Spanish, and the English translation by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, are presented side-by-side. Collateral was awarded the 2012 Paz Prize for Poetry presented by the National Poetry Center and Miami-Dade College. Dinapiera Di Donato teaches Spanish and French in New York.___Val Morehouse, Reviewer.

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Note: This was an ARC book."no soy el cuervo de mi madremi mirada es oscura de bella terminacióny yo no soy el olor del buitre del zamuro del ruego de mi madre/I am not my mother's ravenmy gaze ends beautiful and darkI am no longer the vulture's fragrance or the idiot's or my mother's plea"-- from "No Hablo de una Vida Japonesa, te Estoy Hablando de Mi Madre / I Don't Mean a Japanese Life, I Mean My Mother"Di Donato explores the modern world, full of cell phones and politics and popular music (Ani Di Franco and Janis Joplin, for example), by calling on ancient saints and virgin madonnas and the figures of forgotten Romans and Moors. The Spanish is presented alongside the English translation, but it also includes phrases and translations from Arabic. I struggled with the poems in the first half of the book. Though I enjoyed individual lines, the thoughts jumped from concept to concept so rapidly that I couldn't grasp the overall feeling or meaning of the poem. This confusion may have been, in part, due to the fact that it is a translation and that I'm missing some of the cultural clues.I found plenty of poems to love in the second half of the book, though, were there was a bit more of narrative flow and the structure of the poems didn't feel so disjointed. These poems were enough for me to enjoy the overall experience and I'll come back to this book again to see if my understanding of the first half changes with time.