This highly praised collection explores the disparity between promises and reality, especially as seen from the vantage point of the Hispanic Americans from the time of Columbus to the present.
Promesas: Geography of the Impossible is Gloria Vando’s long-awaited first book of poems, a reunion of some of the complex and fully realized works that have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She received the 1991 Billee Murray Denny Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 1992 Walt Whitman Poetry Context and the 1989 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award.
- Cover
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Promesas: Geography of the Impossible
- I. In the dark Backward
- Fire
- My mother cunning yet innocent
- My father, on the other hand
- Moving pictures
- Practitioner
- Malcriada
- Divorce
- Confianzuda
- Sailor suit
- Visiting day at school
- Prayer
- Letters from my sister
- Latchkey kid
- In the dark backward
- Coping skills
- My life as a book of fiction
- II. On this bitch of an Earth
- Legend of the Flamboyán
- Cry uncle
- Cante Jondo
- Nuyorican lament
- Orphans
- At my father´s funeral
- Annunciations
- Field day
- Commonwealth, Common Poverty
- Psychomachia
- New York city mira mira blues
- III. Singing the land
- An other island
- Out of bounds in Kansas
- Santa Fe journey
- Faith
- Graffito
- Glimpses of Light
- HE 2-104
- Learning my name
- Glossary