In Andrew E. Colarusso’s Hívado, we catch vivid glimpses of a life spent between Puerto Rico and New York: a moment undressing beside a tarn in the rural barrio of Limaní, the loneliness of buses and taxis, dead bees in the corner of an apartment in Brooklyn. Through the lattice of consciousness, cuartos of text become frames of memory, saturated with sense impressions and tender feeling, resulting in a poetry of the first intensity.

“The architecture of Hívado constructs and creates a text that is as much about space as it is about words. In his manipulation of the white space of the page as well as the line, Colarusso generates in the reader a response that is akin to the delight in finding one’s way through a maze, or solving or putting a puzzle together. His bold use of the caesura yields a work that is literally cracked and, therefore, open to all the complicated and difficult energies that that word connotes. Hívado, whose cracks both let in and emit light, is a world unto itself—one in which play, the serious play at the centre of our existence, is at work.”—M. NourbeSe Philip