Neil De La Flor

An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards Neil De La Flor

In An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards, Neil de la Flor takes on the inefficacy of gendered and hetero-sexualized expectations in the modern age. As the poem Shiva points out, Somewhere between male and female, the soul lives unstirred by the memory of childhood // .... Somewhere between Terminal 2 and Terminal 3, the soul lives in a million humming humans who will pass through O Hare in the third person. Inspired in part by music and popular culture, de la Flor employs a brilliant aesthetic sprawl that teems with anaphora and bright imagery; yet within that, there is a rigorous (and ultimately elegiac) interrogation of reality. Pronouns are not to be trusted. You and I can be as close as a spliced consciousness, yet the we is not a harmonious plural. Personalities divide. Alternative memories emerge. Love is a code for lust, one speaker claims, but these poems never settle for hormones and juices. This collection is fierce. Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox