Slow Lightning
Eduardo C. Corral
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Slow Lightning
Eduardo C. Corral
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Elliptically narrative, imagistic, musical, and fabular, the poems in Corral’s debut poetry collection, Slow Lightning, explore the shadowy borderlands of both gay and Chicano identity while adapting and altering aspects of magical realism.
By any standard, Slow Lightning is an impressive debut, a gathering of powerful and often defiant poems that are paradoxically realized through formal control.
Submission is a complicated pleasure, and Corral’s attention to that complication is one of the defining pleasures of this collection. If, as the philosopher Simone Weil suggests, 'attention is form of prayer,' then Corral’s poems are prayers investigating the divine as inextricable from sexuality, which is inextricable from hunger.
Corral rarely repeats a form: beyond sonnets, there are clipped, blocklike texts, page-long chants, lines squeezed down to nothing...and hard-edged, digressive free verse.