Poised for Flight by Rosie Prohías Driscoll

The poems in Rosie Prohías Driscoll‘s debut collection are stepping stones through the liminal spaces which marry the past and present: dual heritages, bilingual explorations into the ways we carry our ancestors in language, memory, and faith. Through a language of her own belonging and with skillfully crafted images and metaphors, Prohías Driscoll fathoms the power of transience and inheritance, all of us pajaritos in flight.

–Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

The poems in Poised for Flight take readers on an intergenerational family journey full of yearning, adventure, and intimacy. In this memoir-in-verse, Rosie Prohías Driscoll traverses her family’s past, present, and imagined futures from Cuba to the United States and back. “Cuéntame // Mami, tell me a story / count me,” she writes, exposing a fundamental truth — that storytelling is a form of taking stock, of asserting who and what counts. Throughout the collection Prohías Driscoll grounds readers with visceral, embodied details and releases them into the airy world of words at play. Her poems, like her children, “live beyond / the plots we have prepared for them.” And while it may be true that “En Cuba no hay papel / ni pá los médicos escribir recetas,” Prohías Driscoll teaches us it’s not in the sheets of paper, but in the stories themselves — told and retold across the generations — that we come to appreciate what counts most.

–Li Yun Alvarado, author of Words or Water

In Poised for Flight, Rosie Prohías Driscoll beautifully braids cultures, languages, and generations – poem by poem, stanza by stanza, line by line. Through her memories, you’ll experience the subtleties of love and loss. Through her stories, you’ll understand the intricacies of joy and heartache. This debut collection brims with heart and history; faith and strength. It will leave readers asking the author for more please/¡más, por favor!

–Dawn Leas, author of A Person Worth Knowing, Take Something When You Go, and I Know When to Keep Quiet