THE ACCIDENTAL, WINNER, 2019 CANTOMUNDO POETRY PRIZE

Cascading through each of the poems in Gina Franco’s The Accidental is a question: What does it mean to be human in a world where the soul is exalted but the body brutalized? Franco explores the terrain of the borderlands—not just the physical space of the American southwest, but the spaces where lines are drawn between body and soul, God and self, violence and ecstasy. Unfolding along these borders in a torrent of deep contemplation, Franco’s poems bring the reader to the line between accident and choice, delving into the role each plays in creating the lives we are born into and in determining how those lives end. A body caught in a tree after a flood—an accident—calls to mind deliberate violences: crucifixion and lynching.

Guided, even so, by a stark hopefulness, The Accidental makes a character of the soul and traces its pilgrimage from suffering toward transcendence. “The soul saw,” Franco writes, “that it saw through the wound.” This book tenders a creation myth steeped in existential philosophy and shimmering with the vernacular of the ecstatic.

“Gina Franco’s second collection evinces a visionary intensity (and indeed, Simone Weil is referenced alongside Hegel, Aquinas, Heidegger, Stevens, Ashbery, and the Mexican photographer and novelist Juan Rulfo). ‘I thought if I could / put the dream down // facts would emerge // from the remains,’ Franco writes, ‘bones / from liquefaction’—‘if I could put the dream down, the dream / would emerge absolved of all dream, all / dreaminess in it destroyed.’ This dreamwork makes possible an elegy for the father, or more precisely, for the image of a father that lingers with the poet: a companion who, having spoken in and through image, can no longer speak back.” —G. C. Waldrep

PRAISE FOR THE KEEPSAKE STORM:

“Franco's poems,” Alice Fulton writes, “enact the thrill of alchemy and metamorphosis, the riveting moment when changelings are betwixt-between, nightingale or monsters—it's hard to tell which, so vast and pliable and layered the scene. The poems bequeath a sense of place so deep it transcends particularity and arrives at the interior terrain of thought, the inscape of what-is.” 

Judith Kitchen, reviewing for the Georgia Review, writes that The Keepsake Storm’s “final sequence is so finely wrought, so nuanced and complicated, that it alone heralds an exciting new presence on the poetic stage.”

Midwest Book Review: "Dealing with such diverse themes as cultural alienation, lost family roots, the ambiguous nature of the self, Gina Franco uses her poetry to reaffirm the power of self-awareness, history, and places."

OTHER PRAISE:

phati'tude’s review of the anthology, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, edited by Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López, addresses the themes of Franco’s essay on poetry and identity: 

"By way of metaphysics, Gina Franco in ‘The Child in the House’ takes us to Latino poetry and a deconstruction of Western narratives. Christianity, language, culture and logocentrism (the idea that we have access to truth by way of reason and written language) are difficult to contest. One contests them by identifying and dismantling the oppressor in American culture, and she acknowledges this by “wielding her sword at abstractions” at history, government and patriarchy. Poetry is a point of dissension. What is to dissent? To live in dualities, at a distance, in opposition and to sustain the differences instead of accepting the hierarchical nature of the first term: right/left, north/south, soul/body, you/me."