Michael Carrino

Until I've Forgotten, Until I'm Stunned Michael Carrino

These poems emerge from where memory, yearning, and sensuality converge in the imaginary. Often the memories are of specific places, people, or subtle moments of understated tension. Ultimately, these poems follow the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi that respects, perhaps glorifies, impermanence, and imperfection in a world not neatly packaged or organized. The imaginative mind seeks refuge, escape, from the banality of such an artificially ordered world. It extols the memory, even in its imperfect recollection. It strives to make routine, and any limited physical space, into a wondrous adventure that celebrates the simple, sensual delights in our lives. Carrino's poetry represents the power of the creative mind to create out of re-creations, a recreational reprieve against existential angst. As always, his aesthetic and craft create a level of yearning and longing, which hints at a loss but also gain. The images and stories in these poems are as sharp and alive as his lines and diction. This is an engaging chapbook that invites us to entertain possible interior spaces and forces us to redirect our gaze to familiar things that we typically take for granted.

-J. L. Torres, author of The Accidental Native and Boricua Passport.

Michael Carrino's Until I've Forgotten, Until I'm Stunned is, in short, stunningly powerful. It's the kind of collection that washes over your senses like a deep spell has been cast. Carrino threads together myriad ideas and considerations with the importance of place-in terms of actual travel and emotional displacement-and both the movement and stillness of time. We see through speaker Alvy's eyes, feel our perceptions shaped by his worldview--and can absolve ourselves of all responsibility for where the poetry takes us because it's Alvy who leads the way. Carrino's Japanese poems remind us that having been to Japan doesn't preclude the sensuality that is explored. And suddenly where the speaker is doesn't matter. All that matters is that you are with him-right here, right now. Carrino's gift is creating that quixotic sensation.

-Carolyne Van Der Meer, author of Journeywoman and Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience