Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Frozen Accident: Poems

Frozen Accident: Poems

Arteaga, Alfred

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $13.95

ISBN10: 1882688325
ISBN13: 9781882688326
Publisher: Tia Chucha Press
Published: Oct 1 2006
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.22
Height: 0.20 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.70
Language: English
Frozen Accident is a long poem and, echoing Dante, its primary section Nezahualcoyotl in Mictlan narrates a trip to hell. Yet, Mictlan is not quite the Inferno. For Alfred Arteaga the place of the dead is California, the last stop for Western culture, the final limit of its reach. The West's poets and philosophers have long declared history over, god dead, and that what remains is merely the house of language. In other words, all is but frozen accident. If the endpoint is California, the poem's point of departure is an assassination that radically shaped history. A young man witnessed his father's murder in a power play that unintentionally enabled the Aztecs to establish an empire. The young man, Nezahualcoyotl, became the philosopher king of Texcoco and wrote the most famous poem of pre-conquest Americas, Song of Flight. What did it mean to be and then to cease to be? Were we all, after all, perhaps but texts of god, existing only in the breath, and red and black inks of divine poetry?

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