The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present
Poetry At The Library
Accounting the Migration Experience and America’s Inequities: Oliver de la Paz and Jill McDonough
Sunday, October 29
3:00 PM
CFPL Goodwin Forum
CFA 2023 POETRY PANELISTS
Oliver de la paz (credit Meredith Pugh)
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (July 2023). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. Learn more at www.oliverdelapaz.com
Oliver de la Paz
ABOUT THE DIASPORA SONNETS
In 1972, after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, Oliver de la Paz’s father, in a last fit of desperation to leave the Philippines, threw his papers at an immigration clerk, hoping to get them stamped. He was prepared to leave, having already quit his job and having exchanged pesos for dollars; but he couldn’t anticipate the challenges of the migratory lifestyle he and his family would soon adopt in America. Their search for a sense of “home” and boundless feelings of deracination are evocatively explored by award-winning poet de la Paz in this formally inventive collection of sonnets.
Broken into three parts―“The Implacable West,” “Landscape with Work, Rest, and Silence,” and “Dwelling Music”―The Diaspora Sonnets eloquently invokes the perseverance and bold possibilities of de la Paz’s displaced family as they strove for stability and belonging. In order to establish her medical practice, de la Paz’s mother had to relocate often for residencies. As they moved from state to state his father worked to support the family. Sonnets thus flit from coast to coast, across prairies and deserts, along the way musing on shadowy dreams of a faraway country.
Written with the deft touch of a virtuoso and the compassion of a loving son, The Diaspora Sonnets powerfully captures the peculiar pangs of a diaspora “that has left and is forever leaving.”
“There is no container more fitting to the conveyance of the nuanced sorrow of the permanent displacement from home, a word ‘ensnared with thorns,’ than the sonnet, certainly as it is practiced by Oliver de la Paz, in metrical couplets, with shimmering music, ‘the syllables of story, // saying then, then, then,’ and a splendorous catalog of details, acutely remembered, and gilded into metaphor. …The tenderness in these poems comes through in their ‘gradations of memory where one // belonged,’ and in their penetrating artfulness, itself a kind of love.”
―Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnet
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
“One of Oliver de la Paz’s gifts is his sense of the book as a whole. In his latest, he turns the sonnet into a lens for slow-motion snapshots of migration . . . Every “Diaspora Sonnet” holds this label as part of its title, the pointed repetition pounding impactfully, each section bookended by a “Chain Migration” ballad and a punctuating final pantoum, a reminder of these poems’ origins.”
“de la Paz employs language both soft-spoken and surprising to elevate the sonnet in his sixth collection of poems . . . An accomplished mid-career poet, de la Paz joins the likes of Diane Seuss and Laurie Ann Guerrero in pushing the sonnet’s form into brilliant new shapes for today’s readers.”
“The thoughtful latest from de la Paz . . . explores his family’s experience of the Filipino diaspora . . . The struggle to create a home in exile is vividly rendered in poems that trace the family’s journeys over the decades: ‘We wanted to construct a livable world/ but the pieces didn’t fit.’ This haunting collection sheds new light on the migrant’s experience of loss and longing.”
“Here the sonnet takes on de la Paz’s narrative and lyric search for home, for what home means, and how we sing about it when it has been taken away. This is a song everyone needs to hear.”
jill mcdonough
Jill McDonough is the author of American Treasure (Alice James, 2022), Here All Night (Alice James, 2019), Reaper (Alice James, 2017), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), Oh, James! (Seven Kitchens, 2012), and Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, she taught incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program for thirteen years. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at UMass-Boston and started a program offering College Reading and Writing in two Boston jails. Learn more at www.jillmcdonough.com
Jill McDonough
ABOUT AMERICAN TREASURE
A 2023 Mass Book Award “Must Read”
Longlisted for the 2022 Julie Suk Award
From the perspective of a teacher in a youth detention center, these hard-hitting poems have a unique blend of dark humor and realism. In a composition of both compassion for America’s unheard voices and contempt for the systems’ unjustness, American Treasure chronicles McDonough’s personal place within the nation. She considers her work with incarcerated students, her privilege, her womanhood, and the connection she shares with others. Through this exploration, McDonough writes with care about the possibility of a people in a country built on cruelty.
Poems prod, ache, question, and laugh, as they tap into the complexity of a modern nation full of contempt for the vile systems woven into the American fabric, while also celebrating those who live in spite of them.
“What does it mean to be free, especially when one’s personal freedoms have come at another’s expense? Jill McDonough’s newest book takes on this question and others, examining what fantasies we engage when we declare ourselves free from pain, free from want, free from prison, free from fear, or free from history, when none of us are ever free from such things. But it’s this shared fantasies of self-governance, McDonough’s biting poems suggest, that are too precious for us to abandon, becoming the real ‘American Treasure’ we each hoard for ourselves. In poems both hilarious and deeply personal, McDonough examines how our refusal to be held accountable for anything finally shackles us to a vision of America that is anything but free. The funniest jokes are, in reality, deadly serious; American Treasure is a wildly funny book.”
— Paisley Rekdal
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
“What I love about Jill McDonough’s poems are the way that they capture the complexity and expansiveness of what it means to be human—how our time on this earth is beautiful and frustrating and often full of contradictions. Reading American Treasure feels like getting a beer with an old friend who is equal parts earnest and hilarious, someone who is full of empathy but who also calls it like they see it. American Treasure reminds me why McDonough is one of my favorite poets.”
“[McDonough is] a poet who moves between the rough-edged, throaty way we speak, and who elevates the language so that we’re more awake to the beauty, absurdity, and possibility in this world — and our short time in it.”