I Offer My Heart as a Target / Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana
Introducing the new winner of the Paz Prize for Poetry, given by the National Poetry Series, featuring an introduction by Rigoberto González, and presented in both Spanish and English.
Forthcoming: 12/3/19
From the introduction by Rigoberto González:
A regular heartbeat is composed of the two sounds made when the blood flows through the organ as the valves contract. To listen to its rhythm through a stethoscope is to appreciate the slight distinction between two movements that are unequivocally connected—one beat calls, the other responds. Similarly, the two sections of Johanny Vázquez Paz’s stunning book of poems offer the reader distinct tones powered by the same source: perseverance.
In the first part, the speaker declares herself a survivor. Her story is rooted to a violent landscape that some may call home, though for this woman home is a battleground, her body ravaged by war ...
The second part examines a much different challenge that presents itself to many immigrants: displacement. The speaker’s struggle to hold on to her past, indeed her history, via her native Spanish language is compromised by the pressures of assimilation . . .
Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana is a book of victory over silence and the truest testament to what it means to outlive that which has defeated or deflated many. If there’s a spirit guiding the courage embedded in its pages, it must be the Phoenix, the miraculous being that rises from the ashes reborn, or rather, pieced together again. The heart beats once more. The woman reclaims the word.
The Paz Prize for Poetry is presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center for Writing and Literature at Miami Dade College and is awarded biennially. Named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet Octavio Paz, it honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident.
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