Las Horas Imposibles / the Impossible Hours

"The time has come for cross-border poetics to become a core element of a Greater Americas humanism. Driven by a passionate devotion to convinencia, Octavio Quintanilla's The Impossible Hours transforms the hyper-situatedness of the dispossessed, the alienated, the cursed, into a Cathedral of Light whose dazzling insights splash us with a searing new cosmovision." - Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point

"Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours writes of La Bestia, the train that cuts off the legs of desperate Latin American exiles, turns bullets into raindrops and umbrellas, and pushes poems around on the page until they become wild word paintings. This book has much to teach us." - Spencer Reece, author of The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir

"I want to think where I'm going will be free of borders, Quintanilla writes. These poems - informed by an artist's eye, the art shifted by a poet's vision - refuse to ignore thresholds, strange angles, and blockades. We lodge in tight corners and find prayers emerge from line and shadow." - Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of In Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon

"Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours pushes against itself and ruptures the poetic grids inhabited by beasts, storms, scarecrows, black cows, neighbors digging graves at night, and poems that dismantle the physical and psychological structure of our realities. It invites us to confront our own mortality, and bears witness to the testimonies of rage and hope tattooed on our flesh/spirit." - Elizabeth Torres, winner of the 2 22 Ambroggio Prize for Loterí a: Nocturnal Sweepstakes

"Las Horas Impossibles / The Impossible Hours gathers seemingly simple everyday events and objects and elevates them to levels rarely seen&mdash poems, like 'Black Cow,' where the last line delivers a punch not easily forgotten. If this were a meal, the various courses would delight my senses. With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum. I like the playful yet serious tone that disarms and allows the messages in the poem to sneak in and reverberate in the reader's mind." - Norma E. Cantú , author of Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers

"When you enter Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, you step into a language-built landscape, a witness summoned by the trickster of art that will not conform to genre. Here, the reader is invited to inhabit a world both familiar and estranged, where the personal and the collective intertwine in luminous, haunting images, and poetry becomes both vessel and voyage." - CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry