Orlando Menes will read on October 14, 2015 at 7:30 PM in the Hammes campus bookstore.
Menes will read from his most recent publication, Heresies, which has been deemed an invocation of Latin American and Caribbean culture, history, and spirituality. Through free verse and poetic forms, the collection is visually charged and sonically rich. The poems incorporate history, legend, and magical realism to create a cross-cultural baroque feeling.
"Brutally irreverent, reverently made, at once polyphonic and singular in its scope, Heresies is a work of fearless, sublimely syncretic imagination."
--Daniel Tobin, author of Belated Heavens
Orlando Ricardo Menes is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches creative writing, literature, and translation. His latest poetry collections are Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) and Fetish, winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of Furia (Milkweed, 2005) and Rumba atop the Stones (Peepal Tree, 2001). His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, includingMy Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009). That same year he received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry delves into questions of liminality, the hybrid sacred, diaspora and exile, and the relationship between the cross-cultural imagination and a poetics of the baroque.