Melancolia

Poetry. MELANCOLÍA explores the emotional and psychological landscape of today's mad world. The poems wrestle with loss, despair, love, longing, the challenges of being a father and a husband, the search for identity, and the fight for one's soul. While the collection is not without hope, it resists easy redemption and facile optimism.

"Agitations both tender and muscular simmer inside these poems. A sadness that's palpable and physical haunts this poet; so does rage at the power- mongers' forces that keep children hungry, that fester poverty in terrifying mutations. Poet of engagement, García speaks to the moon, to his sister, to the seasons and the garden, to his body a vessel: 'these hands like a chunk of asteroid-full of taking & giving.' This book offers us a photo-real blueprint of one man's life-space, an elegant blues-print of one man's heart, with direct utterance and lavish music." —Judith Vollmer

"Roberto Carlos García is, it seems to me, poet-kin of both Lorca and Neruda, but also things like rain, wind, the color yellow and the color green. In MELANCOLÍA we have a collection of gorgeously quiet poems rendered by intellect and the dream where lyricism is born out of the dusky space between mystery and the everyday. Here is a breathtaking archive of an imagination at work, a body made up of effort and world. See: 'My friends I am not above you // I can hear the song of reckoning in the rose thorns' and 'In my mouth Melancolía is an orchard, / a yellowing day & bluing night, // In my ribcage Melancolía is an ecstatic lilt / made of pearls, my heart-wet sand, / pungent as dogwoods.'" —Aracelis Girmay

"In these sensuous poems everything is up for inspection and interrogation, including the speaker himself. Here are echoes of Lorca and Neruda, their depth and power, but in a voice entirely the poet's own. Roberto Carlos García's poems take beauty as a gift, and also as a sometimes foil against capitalism and the numbness of the suburban life we are supposed to desire. '& what is poetry if not what we need?' We need poems like these, with their living language and their vision of where we are and where poetry, ecstatic and elegiac, can take us." —Anne Marie Macari

"These poems ache and plead and yearn, and never forget song. Never forget song." —Ross Gay