Pablo Medina

The Foreigner's Song: New and Selected Poems Pablo Medina

Poetry. Latinx Studies. It is simply not possible to discuss Pablo Medina's work without first recognizing his sheer mastery. In THE FOREIGNER'S SONG, Medina skillfully merges the bard and the troubadour as his poems at once court love, share origin stories, compose music, and archive a history. Breathless in the grip of this collection, readers will acquire a new sight that can simultaneously speak, feel, hear, and see the poem alive. Medina's ability to dialectically fuse the sensual and the spiritual, the infinite and the momentary, the mundane and the sublime are, quite frankly, a rare rhetorical and sensory feat. The work in THE FOREIGNER'S SONG is an account, decades in the making, where desire--holy and persistently ephemeral--finds its origins in the migratory cycle of memory artfully plumbed and a life conscientiously considered. This brilliantly rendered work is an example of what literature at its highest and finest can do.--Airea D. Matthews