Carnaval

What happens when expectations about how life will unfold—rather traditional ones, as it happens—are disrupted by a restless soul that insists on continually re-writing the script? Carnaval follows a young woman as she moves away from the life she once imagined into one shaped by travel, art, and mystery. Many of the poems gathered here were inspired by regular trips to Mexico while others recall her childhood, especially working in the garden with her father. The streets and markets of Mexican cities, Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, Zapotec weavings, the films of Werner Herzog, the ritual sacrifice of goats in Oaxaca, tequila and sangrita, orchids, Frida Kahlo’s Naturaleza Muerta, and a rural vegetable garden gather here, reflecting a vision of life that is at once sensuous, searching, and unsettled. Moving fluidly between inherited form and contemporary lyric, Susan L. Miller’s poems bring formal intelligence to bear on questions of faith, desire, and the sources of true freedom. She brings together the vivid, the hidden, the sacred, and the profane, weaving music and language into a tilma etched with the image of the Empress of the Americas. Soundtracked by Celia Cruz, Edith Piaf, Nick Drake, Chavela Vargas, Wilco, Enrico Caruso, Frank Sinatra, and Spanish Marian hymns, and inspired by the photographs of Graciela Iturbide, this collection conjures the joy and the melancholy—the sacramental and the anarchic—spirit that lies at the heart of carnaval.