The Roswell Poems

Rane Arroyo

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Retail Price: $12.00
Subject Category: Poetry
Length: 72 pages
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Binding: paper
Published: February 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60226-001-6

 

"What is a more quintessentially American story than an alien spacecraft crashing in the New Mexico desert in 1947? Rane Arroyo takes this story and writes a history not only of the event but of our country. There are cowboys, Indians, mayors, generals, J. Edgar Hoover—all in a painting of post-war paranoia and euphoria. Arroyo is half Norman Rockwell half Jackson Pollack, sketching photographically while splashing like a wild man. The reds of his small town nobodies merge with the blues of his own movieland dreams and the blacks and whites of what really happened. Or did it? Is Truth really Beauty? What can we know except this country is almost too weird to believe, but we open our eyes every day, and believe we must. The Roswell Poems is Americana at its most beautiful and bizarre."

Barbara Hamby, author of Delirium and Babel

"'The 20th Century is full of footnotes,' writes Rane Arroyo. In The Roswell Poems, the footnotes for Roswell, New Mexico, 1947, are written in couplets, in sonnets, in lyrical dramatic monologues, chatroom IMs, and imaginary film trailers. What happened in Roswell takes on 21st Century political significance in Arroyo's newest and most accomplished work, and reminds us that 'logic/ (is) a dreamer with holes in its pockets' and that 'mystery is/ one of the names that God wears.'"

Kathy Fagan, author of The Charm and MOVING & ST RAGE

"Rane Arroyo's The Roswell Poems with sly brilliance create a 'memory foil' of poetry that pivots on a cowboy rancher discovering crash debris in the New Mexico desert. Arroyo dives down into that wreck and with his dream elegance of words, music, and psychological probing, exposes all the offbeat complexity of a land whose first peoples already knew about alien invasions. This book is a tour de force, interweaving individual stories with history, present time and future, with the mythic exerting its paradoxical truths and possibilities through it all. The Roswell Poems are America, right up to 9/11 and beyond. To read this book is to be abducted in heart-shaking and beautiful ways by Rane Arroyo's vision-craft."

Susan Deer Cloud, recipient of the 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship and author of The Last Ceremony