Iguana Variations in Winter

Jaswinder Bolina

They may fall from the trees, but they are not dead.National Weather Service Miami

don’t mistake for suffering what isn’t suffering | the hint of
a chill tossing some palms

___

me in a frumpy green sweater | the iguanas swooning
in verdant afghans

___

limp and leather | a flurry of iguanas startled the road

___

atop an emerald Lexus plopped the iguana ! the snowbirds
mistook it for a chameleon driving through their lush resort

___

like a sculpture of itself | the iguana depicted stillness
without any fear of stillness

___

I’m afraid of many things | but none is the iguana
lying naked on a swale in its dead dream of winter

Feature Date

January 10, 2024

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“Iguana Variations in Winter” from ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE: by Jaswinder Bolina.
Published by Copper Canyon Press on October 17, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Jaswinder Bolina.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Jaswinder Bolina’s books include his debut essay collection Of Color (McSweeney’s 2020) and four full-length poetry collections, English as a Second Language and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press 2023), The 44th of July (Omnidawn 2019), Phantom Camera (New Issues Press 2013, winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry), and Carrier Wave (CLP 2007, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry). He is also author of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly 2014). His poems have appeared in journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry, among others. His essays have been featured at the Washington Post, Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Believer, and elsewhere.

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English as a Second Language

Copper Canyon Press

Port Townsend, Washington

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“Pierces through its sketch-comedy conceit . . . with poignent anxieties.”
—Christopher Spaide, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

“With his third collection, Jaswinder Bolina hits his stride, melding fierce and heartbroken politics with a flair for the surreal to portray America in the throes of the pandemic. . . . Bolina’s ironic humor feels like the inevitable vehicle for this insight, and these poems are often darkly laugh-out-loud funny.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“Jaswinder Bolina turns the elegy on its head (or at least twists its arm) . . . and they are so often comic, making the reader chuckle as often as weep.”
—Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake

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