“With Magnificent Errors, Luna has broken the regional boundaries of the
American Southwest and become one of America’s finest poets.” —
Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning
“In Magnificent Errors, Sheryl Luna shows us once again why she is one of
America’s premier poets. Her gutsy, gorgeous language, her hard-won vision
of grit and grace—all bid us enter the universe of a poetic saint whose earthy
wisdom is unparalleled.” —Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and
Tongues of Men and Angels
Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows mental health
challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.
In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned
Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature
with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the
poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest
Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the
margins, whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal,
celebrating their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals
who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her
poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless
individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people
with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, PTSD, poets, visual artists, and
people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey
to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how
healing is possible.
The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly
personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with
difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties
including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the
mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches
us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow
throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption.
With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these
remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization
and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.
AUTHOR DETAILS
Sheryl Luna’s first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, won the inaugural
Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets (University of Notre
Dame Press, 2005). Her second book of poetry, Seven, was a finalist for the
Colorado Book Award. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo,
Anderson Center, Ragdale Foundation, and Canto Mundo. She received the
Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from Sandra Cisneros in 2008.
Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner,
Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, and Notre Dame Review, among
others.
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