In Sweet Geometry, Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes with such ferocity of the struggle with life-threatening illness, that these poems take on the tenor of myth, the largesse of cultural and personal history, the reinvention of landscape, and the vibration of the visionary. She reports from the present tense of the underworld of COVID-19 - from the cosmic center of the battle to survive, fueled by her love of her children. "I would use a knife or a chisel to reach breath," she tells us, and indeed these poems fight their way toward mercy, and map the body's "narrative of resistance." Written from her sickbed, from fever's blazing epicenter, Contreras Schwartz has given us a crucial antidote to American denialism.
-Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets, 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
The cosmos, the ongoing shift of selves, ancestral regions, undergrounds and over-grounds, sudden leaps, transitions, and fractals of the body radiating through multiple figures. These are a few of the elements of Leslie's poetic cosmos. There are hospital charts, COVID-19 data, Navajo remembrances, and life and deep journeys into the Mayan realm of the dead, Xibalba - yet there is an uncanny personal day-to-day life that is entangled to all dimensions of existence.
An intelligent, feverish, multi-lens of multi-lives threaded to the cosmos, yet fractured and sewn back into a second cosmos. A poetry of paradox and transformations, cultural frames, multi-worlds of the self. A most unique text and for sure - a ferocious groundbreaker.
-Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus
