Poem That Never Ends
Silvina López Medin
Sparked by the only two letters —out of over a hundred—that López Medin’s mother saved from her own mother in Paraguay, POEM THAT NEVER ENDS weaves together poems and family photos to explore the fragmentation of time, memory, and mother-child relationships. Fragments, family hearing impairments, ripped-up letters, and living and writing between languages point to the inescapable holes in language, troubling the notion of a finite utterance. Layering elements of painting, cinema, and the elusive three dimensions of theater into the weave, Poem That Never Ends traces a sequence of mothers—López Medin’s mother, her mother’s mother, herself as a mother—in a porous, restless gesture toward what’s never fully grasped.
“The mental fabric of lines and ellipses, of temporal creases, abridgments, places and dates is traced against the physical materiality of images, of letters, cloth, photographs and drawings, and in that tracing reminds us that meaning cannot occur without words. In Poem That Never Ends, we glimpse pieces of a familial history, a “reaching to confirm what’s been forgotten,” only to affirm whatever fragments remain present and alive. Fragments are stitched to other fragments to make new wholes. The personal intersects and informs the historical; seeing intersects and informs hearing; one language breaches and breathes into another. “The circle becomes a hole, we are inside it, my family and I. Surrounded by the events, though on the surface untouched.” This is a stunning and deeply moving book.”
— Ann Lauterbach
“In López Medin’s Poem That Never Ends, the crosswise threads overlay each other, loosely intertwined to build a tensile logic of lineage, time that’s come and gone, and generational edges. Our understanding of what constitutes the edge of anything forever shifts and in time, the selvage becomes the center and the center drifts too. There is a spectral glow in these pieces that reach and keep reaching. They don’t reach to stake a claim or to grasp. They reach to hold the fragments and offer a pliable, possible extension. Through it all, the mother, the mother’s mothers, the sons, and their fractious looped landscapes haunt us in this collection that opens a window, cracks a door. Both the door and the window stay open.”
— Asiya Wadud
“Through fragments and short sections (prose, poem, neither, both) that can (but shouldn’t) be pieced together into a kind of reckoning with motherhood, Poem That Never Ends places hereditary loss of hearing and linguistic barriers next to their common responses—leaning in to ears, reading lips—forcing the reader to reckon with any desire they may have to know the whole story. I have been haunted for months by an after-tone of Silvina López Medin’s Zoom-mediated voice reading the titular “Poem That Never Ends, ”an intimate, mysterious experience that returned as I read the book and left me wanting to whisper in everyone’s ear, Read this.”
— Anna Moschovakis
SILVINA LÓPEZ MEDIN was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York. Her books of poetry include: La noche de los bueyes (Madrid, 1999), winner of the Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize, Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar (Buenos Aires, 2014; That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove, tr. Jasmine V. Bailey, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021), 62 brazadas (Buenos Aires, 2015), and Excursión (Buenos Aires, 2021). Excursion was selected by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the Oversound Chapbook Prize (Oversound, 2020). Her hybrid poetry book Poem That Never Ends was a winner of the Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell Contest (Essay Press, 2021). Her play Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo, 2008) was granted the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (2015) into Spanish. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, BrooklynRail, and MoMA/post, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.
www.silvinalopezmedin.com
Reviews
Molly Bendall, Los Angeles Review of Books
Rob Mclennan, Rob Mclennan’s Blog
Orchid Tierney, Jacket2
Amanda Moore, Women’s Voices for Change
Tasslyn Magnusson, Mom Egg Review
Rebecca Valley, Drizzle Review
Alina Stefanescu, Cleveland Review of Books
Leo Boix, Morning Star
Emily Pérez, Rhino Poetry
Constance Hansen, Harvard Review