Los Lorcas: Merch
Winner of the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize
Not Yet a Jedi by Partridge Boswell
Now available for preorder HERE!
The contest judge, Wendy Barnes, had this to say about the collection:
“Partridge Boswell\’s Not Yet a Jedi rockets through the late 20th century and into the present with its diction in hyperdrive, fusing whimsy to seriousness, blunt statement to syntactic complexity. These tautly constructed poems evoke the aspirations, fresh-cut grass smell, and low-level depression that characterize cookie-cutter suburbia—and the ways the adults who grew up there cling to a played-out, optimistic vision of the American Dream despite themselves. Poems span a range of emotional registers, but even in their pensive moments, they are so kinetic that their full force can only be appreciated if you read them while popping wheelies on your BMX or grooving under the splattering light of a disco ball, where the melancholy will still find you, as “your black-lit heart blooms luminous in the blue dark.”
“We encounter poems of experience in Partridge Boswell’s remarkable first book, poems of a lived life and the aesthetic care that arises from a long apprenticeship. He fills ‘the canvas of our waking sentience’ with a combination of image and statement, equal to the complexities of his concerns. If we are ‘trapped in the amber of the moment’ (Vonnegut), as one of his epigraphs states, Boswell does not try to untrap us, but to deliver, time and again, with brilliant accuracy, what it feels like to be alive in such moments. As good a debut as I can remember!”— Stephen Dunn
“Such desperate beauty in these poems, such rendered and willed surviving. Read this book if you want to remember what poetry can do to us, how it can find words for what can’t be said and shake us by our shoulders until we feel achingly alive again.”— Marie Howe
“The poems (in Some Far Country) leave you feeling breathless, embarrassed, sad, vulnerable, and in awe of the world around us.” —Vermont Public Radio
“Partridge Boswell’s collection of poems, SOME FAR COUNTRY, moves through sharp transitions or feints of image, idea and music that remind me of the original sad brilliance of an early Auden. His photo-electric immersions which can confuse the ‘limousine with the hearse’ tell stories with great suddenness of heart and mind. This is a wonderful book.”— Norman Dubie
American Drone: New & Select Poems by Peter Money
Some say “mad” postcards. Some say “an international call and response,” a sort of too-full screen of blues. Some say whispers. In fact, AMERICAN DRONE, this American poet’s first full collection in a long time, takes rap, hip-hop, folk and pop tradition, film and daily news as his guide toward subjects (and forms). Former laureate Baron Wormser (Paris Review Editions/Houghton Mifflin) says “Peter Money has taken on full-bore, straight-up, flat-out the necessary charge to the poet in these global/electronic times…. He has the chops and range…from page-long, all-verbal-hands-on-deck meditations and urgings to brief, exquisite lyrics [Peter Money has] an enormous appetite for language as a transfiguring force” and “poems…to inhabit.” The three distinct sections of AMERICAN DRONE are dense, reflective, andin the final partfiercely intimate as they own their own space and honor everyone’s right to what’s personal.
“Prolific coming in from all directions” —Allen Ginsberg
Last Night in America by Los Lorcas
In the spirit of Federico Garcia Lorca—gifted musician, legendary poet/playwright and ebullient performer—poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, fuse poetry and music in a passionate and surprising mash-up. Los Lorcas blurs boundaries between spoken word and song, weaving poetry with Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana and jazz in pursuit of the cante jondo (deep song) Lorca so ardently championed.
Exploring common roots and synergies of poetry and music, Los Lorcas celebrate the poetry of song lyrics and music of lyrical poetry in soulful original compositions and arrangements of poems by Lorca, Yeats, Marley, Dylan, Dickinson, Cohen, Merwin and Millay, among others. Troubadouring widely in the US and abroad (Ireland and Slovenia), Los Lorcas have performed in diverse venues [Poetry Center San Jose, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Burlington Book Festival, Tucson Book Festival, Bookstock Literary Festival (w/ Robert Pinsky’s PoemJazz), Chandler Music Hall, Vermont College of Fine Arts, KGB Reading Series, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poetry Café and Caffe Lena], attesting to the broad appeal of their innovative vision of how poetry and music might exist together in a world less preoccupied with taxonomy and boundaries.
“Los Lorcas in unity is a marvel that would silence any creative individual to awe, inspiring the quietest observer to reach for each word as if they were Federico Lorca himself, meditating on song and poetry mid-stage, arms outstretched.”—Bianca Viñas, PoemCity 2018
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