Mark Statman

Hechizo Mark Statman

An hechizo is, for good or ill, a spell, a kind of magic cast into or from life's uncertainties, an act of language, eliciting both the furies of a corrupt world and the redemptions of love, poetry in its earliest and most enduring form. Mark Statman's HECHIZO draws on both types of spells with an urgent lyricism, at once quick-moving and inclusive. There is a unique capacity here for engaging the furies of the social and political fully with the self, a measure of judgment and complicity, akin to the morally complex rhapsodic traditions of modern poetry in Spanish, which Statman successfully engaged with as a translator. The collection ends with a section of love poems, also called Hechizo, redemptive but hardly certain, the prospect of love, for his parents, for two strangers sighted in the park, for himself. This is a powerful collection, personal, in the best, most richly evolved sense.--Michael Anania

Poetry. Latinx Studies.