CATCH A GLOW by Karl Michael Iglesias

CATCH A GLOW, is both reverent and a reckoning. Iglesias moves through raw narratives with the strength, grace and focus of a dancer: combining moves, challenging rhythms, guiding each poem beyond routine and into the open bliss of abandon, the way truth-telling tends to feel.

–Dasha Kelly, Poet Laureate of Milwaukee

“Karl Michael Iglesias invents a new grammar in CATCH A GLOW. Finding the official language used to describe Hurricane Maria lacking, Iglesias has electrified the language in his book by stacking verbs, breaking lines in the middle of sentences,  and using caesuras to alter logic. Iglesias has given us a book of poems up to the challenge of holding our grief and rage.”

–José Olivarez, CITIZEN ILLEGAL

“CATCH A GLOW is a beautiful collage of fragments that create a new Boricua diaspora, in a post-Hurricane Maria world. With his use of staccato phrases and rhythmic language, Iglesias reenacts on the page, both the splintering and mending of a people and nation. This is an important and much-needed collection.”

–Mayda Del Valle, A SOUTH SIDE GIRL’S GUIDE TO LOVE & SEX

As if a storm blew through, the poems in CATCH A GLOW are left wind-sharpened and rain-beaten, fragments sometimes whittled into blades, other times the edges are smooth as music drifting from yard to window. These poems sing their jagged love songs for the people and land of Puerto Rico brilliantly, illuminating for me bright lessons on intimacy, justice, and survival. Karl Michael Iglesias takes up this book’s broken, mosaic style and does his people right. Like money or parcel packed heavy with supplies to get the living done, these poems soar their way to the island and our hearts with their urgent, skillful care.

–Danez Smith, HOMIE

If hurricane poetry was a genre, Karl Michael Iglesias would be at the vanguard of its practice. CATCH A GLOW is a book that comes at you from the outset.  The fragmented diaspora is alive in Iglesias’s concision. His witness is biting in its undecorated minimalism. We are literally left to deal with the white spaces between the wreckage depicted in these poems. CATCH A GLOW is made of items, memories, and people who survived the longest blackout in history to take jibaro baths and who were left to count the names after the destruction.  You can find that which is spoken, whispered, and buried in Iglesias’ book.  No need to answer when they ask “Were you affected by Hurricane Maria?” Just give them this book.”

–Willie Perdomo, THE CRAZY BUNCH.

Reivew: https://www.breakwaterreview.com/single-post/book-review-catch-a-glow-karl-michael-iglesias