Eduardo C. Corral holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a CantoMundo fellow, he teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University. He lives in New York City.
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Slow LightningPoemsFrom"The Blindfold"
I draw the curtains. The room darkens, but
the mirror still reflects a crescent moon.
I pull the crescent out, a rigid curve
that softens into a length of cloth.
I wrap the cloth around my eyes,
and I’m peering through a crack in the wall
revealing a landscape of snow.
Slow Lightning:Poems -
Slow LightningPoemsFrom"Border Triptych"
Sapo & I wait for the cool of night under mesquite.
Three days in the desert & we’re still too close to Mexico,
still so far from God. Sapo’s lips so dry he swabs the pus leaking
from the ampollas on his toes across his mouth. I flip a peso.
Heads: we continue. Tails: we walk toward the highway,
thumb our way back to Nogales. The peso disappears into a nest
but the hard-on in Sapo’s jeans, slightly curved, points west.
I catch a cascabel & strip off its meat. Sapo mutters, No que no guey.
Slow Lightning:Poems -
Slow LightningPoemsFrom"Poem After Frida Kahlo’s Painting The Broken Column"
On a bench, beneath a candle-lit window
whose sheer curtains resemble honey
sliding down a jar, Kahlo lifts her skirts.
A brown monkey chews a tobacco leaf
between her legs, tail brushing her thigh.
A skirt falls; the hem splashes on the floor
like urine. A ruby ring on her forefinger.
No, the tip of a cigarette. Smoke rising.
The long hair of an old woman drowning.
Slow Lightning:Poems
"[W]e can make of what would blind us a conduit for changed vision, suggests Corral. In these poems, a cage implies all the rest that lies outside it; any frame frames a window through which to see other possibilities unfolding . . . Like Hayden, Corral resists reductivism. Gay, Chicano, 'Illegal-American,' that’s all just language, and part of Corral’s point is that language, like sex, is fluid and dangerous and thrilling, now a cage, now a window out. In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority. His refusal to entirely trust authority wins my trust as a reader." —Carl Phillips, Yale Series of Younger Poets contest judge [on Slow Lightning]
“[Corral] seamlessly blends English and Spanish in Slow Lightning.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly
"He mixes colloquial Spanish and English, and he packs many, many lines with sharp, sensual, specific imagery—this is Technicolor poetry . . . Very engaging." —Ray Olson, Booklist [on Slow Lightning]
“By any standard, Slow Lightning is an impressive debut, a gathering of powerful and often defiant poems that are paradoxically realized through formal control.” —Lambda Literary Review
“These poems are alluring, moving, playful and elegiac,” said the Whiting judges. “They have flashes of surrealism and sometimes a lovely in extremis strangeness.”